Holosun HS503GU Circle Micro Red Dot Sight

We remember the dark days of red dot sights, when there were basically 3 viable options on the market. EOTech, Aimpoint, or C-More. Thankfully, in today’s market, we are blessed to have an incredible range of options when it comes to optics. The best thing about having more competition in the marketplace is that it drives the price of high-quality optics down in the marketplace, which is where Holosun comes into play. Holosun Technologies makes a variety of red dot styles, shapes, and sizes, but for today, we’ll focus specifically on the HS503GU. The 503GU falls in line with the likes of the Aimpoint Micro T1, and Sig Romeo and is a small footprint, traditional tube style red dot, which has some real benefits for a general purpose gun that we’ll cover a little later.

The Holosun 503GU uses a single CR2032 in it’s 6061 aluminum housing to provide 50,000+ hours of battery life, which is only helped by the addition of Holosun’s Shake Awake® Technology, which will automatically shut the dot off during periods of inactivity, and instantly re-activate the sight to the previous brightness setting when it senses motion. This feature alone makes an attractive pick for a home-defense optic. This red dot also features a user selectable reticle, offering either a traditional 2 MOA red dot, or the same 2 MOA dot, surrounded by a 65 MOA ring, ala EOTech style. We prefer the simplicity of the single red dot. Dot on target, press trigger, done. With either reticle, there are 12 total brightness settings, 10 daytime and 2 night-vision compatible.

But, the real question… How does it perform? The windage and elevation adjustments are positive, consistent, and we haven’t had a need to re-zero since an initial range trip. Earlier, we mentioned the fact that this is a closed tube style sight, as opposed to something like the Trijicon RMR, or Leupold DeltaPoint, which is a more open style sight with a little better visibility due to the smaller housing. While most people prefer something like the open heads up style sight like a Leupold DeltaPoint Pro for competition or range guns, we like this style for more general purpose or defense use. The closed unit allows for easier use in inclement conditions, since nothing can get to the surface of the lens that emitter actually hits. Anybody who’s ever tried to shoot an open sight in the rain knows the “thousand dot syndrome” with water on the screen. This simply can’t happen with the tube. As long as you can see through the back lens of the sight, you can probably make a pretty accurate shot.

So, how does it rank up against other sights? Is it as absolutely rock-solid as an Aimpoint T1/T2? It’s hard to say, since we’re not in the habit of deliberately abusing my optics, but after this much time hands on, we’re don’t have any reason to doubt this sight is more than suitable for the vast majority of people. Especially when you take into account the price point of a $250 MSRP, this is probably the best value in the red dot optic game today.