Faster in Daylight, Visable at Night!
Anyone who relies exclusively upon iron sights with an AR system MUST get a front tritium sight. Even with pricey optic solutions, it just makes sense to have it as a backup at this price. The vertical white stripe makes for a fast daylight sight/target acquisition, and the same goes for the vertically mounted tritium vial at night. The top tip of the sight is still black, so a precision sight picture can still be obtained. If you are using holographic sights (EoTech 552 here) and forget to turn the optic on, the stripe is reasonably visible though the glass and is quite usable for close range targets (this goes for both daylight and night... the tritium vial glows about as bright as most of my pistol sights, but since it's visible surface area is about twice that of a pistol nightsight, it's quicker to visually find at night than pistol sights; even through my EoTech glass. There are two potential downsides of this and most other tritium sights: 1) since the tritium only shows up on one of the four corners of the sight, vertical sight adjustment is limited to a 5-MOA per full-turn granularity. That means that you have to rotate the sight 360 degrees to get the tritium back around (bypassing three detents of 1.25" MOA adjustability each along the way!). Now, if you have an A3 style rear sight (with a range adjustment knob) you can use that to get the sight dialed in (and even keep the ranging capability), but without that (which is commonly missing with the currently crop of popular flip-up rear sights) you had better cross your fingers and hope you end up within an inch or two of where you want to hit at 100 yards, or you might have a problem of dialing in a battle-sight-zero of 250 yards with a fixed elevation rear sight. 2) This sight post is about twice as wide as the standard AR front sight (you gotta put that tritium vial somewhere!), which means that it will be more difficult to get precision hits at distance with the iron sights. This isn't much of an issue for those using mil-spec optics, and hey, it's even faster for common battle distances of under 100 yards; but for those relying upon iron sights exclusively, don't plan on getting fast-easy hits at 400 yards with this fat front sight! That said, I love the sight and for my uses, the above two considerations are non-issues for me.
