The New Meprolight M22 Dual-Illumination, No Battery Rifle Optic: Review

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Meprolight introduced the Mepro M21 more than 20 years ago. It was designed for and adopted by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in 2001. It was a simple, dual-illumination, battery-free optic. Fiber optics (FO) collected light to illuminate the reticle during the day, and at night the reticle was illuminated by tritium. The Mepro M21 has seen a lot of use by the IDF and has been used in combat. However, it wasn’t perfect. The new Mepro M22 was designed to be an improvement over the M21. It’s smaller, lighter and boasts a brighter reticle. The M21 looked and looks (as it’s still available) like a supersized version of the original Trijicon Reflex (if you remember those). The M22 looks more modern, and instead of an opaque layer of white polymer on the front (behind which was the fiber optic collector) the M22 has windows in the sides, top and front of the polymer body through which you can see the fiber optic collector rods coiled in a spiral. It comes complete with a quick-detach (QD) throw lever mount. 

Fiber optic illumination means the reticle automatically adjusts brightness according to ambient light, and there are no batteries to fail. At night, the radioactive tritium faintly illuminates the reticle, and the tritium will usually last for ten years or so. Currently there is just one model of M22, but you have your choice of two illuminated red reticles, a 3.5 MOA/40 MOA circle/dot they call their bullseye reticle, or a 10 MOA triangle. I am a big fan of circle/dot reticles, but the version in the M22 feels a bit cluttered to me. The walls of the 40 MOA ID circle are 4.5 MOA thick. For comparison the EOTech HWS pairs a 1 MOA dot with a 68 MOA circle. I went with the triangle.  But FYI, it is not a true 10 MOA triangle. The circle that would just fit inside the triangle is 10 MOA in diameter, which makes the equilateral triangle reticle roughly 15 MOA tall. You use the entire triangle as your reticle at CQB distances= and aim with the point at traditional rifle distances. Pro tip—zero your rifle at 50 yards using the tip of the triangle, and anywhere closer than that you’ll be hitting inside the top half of the triangle, so just use the triangle as your “dot.”

M22 Specs Breakdown

The Mepro M22 officially weighs 9.2 ounces, but my digital scale put it at 8.8 ounces. That includes the built-in aluminum mount with QD throw lever. The polymer body of the optic seems both thick and tough. It is 3.9-inches long, 2.7 inches tall and 1.6-inches wide. The optic is designed for a flattop AR, and it puts the reticle 1.5 inches above the rail, which means you can use your iron sights in the lower 1/3 of the window. The M22 is officially “night vision compatible.” If you take it into a completely dark room, you will be able to just faintly see the reticle with your unaided eye due to the tritium illumination. While I didn’t get a chance to test it with a NV optic, if you can see the reticle with the unaided eye, that means it will be very bright under a night vision optic. Windage and elevation adjustments are 1 MOA, and you can adjust them using a screwdriver, coin or base of a cartridge case. The entirety of the optic is simple and robust. In full disclosure, I will admit that I did not get this optic in from the manufacturer for testing as is usually the case, I won it at a media event, so I feel no obligation to say anything but the brutal truth. And the truth is…this optic has me confounded. I like it…but there’s so much about this optic that just doesn’t make sense. This is the “new and improved” version of the M21, and yet in many ways the M22 is only a cutting-edge optic if we somehow travel back to 1990. The reticle is bright enough outdoors, but just barely, and in other lighting conditions you might find yourself struggling to spot it. And I think this was done deliberately, as no other explanation makes sense.

I was told by Meprolight reps that red reticles don’t illuminate as brightly as amber reticles, and that’s true. But I’m a big fan of FO-powered optics and have a plethora of Trijicon FO optics in my collection, with both red and amber reticles. All of them are much brighter than the Meprolight. In fact, the Trijicon AccuPoint scopes have rotating sunshields to cover up some or all of their fiber optic collectors as they can. They can easily get too bright in direct sunlight—and they’ve been like that for decades. I was at the last Soldier of Fortune 3-Gun match in Las Vegas way back in 2000, and there I saw competitors using the Trijicon 3.5X ACOG, and they had to cover the fiber optic collector atop it with masking tape to keep the reticle brightness down to manageable levels in the desert sun. I have a dual-illuminated (FO/tritium) Trijicon RMR, and even with its tiny collector atop the housing the reticle on that optic is brighter than the one in the M22.  There is no way the engineers at Meprolight can’t make the reticle brighter on the M22, they’ve just apparently chosen not to, and this frustrates me. I understand that this optic was built, in part, for people fighting in the sunny desert, but they also do CQB indoors, and therein lies the problem. 

Outdoors, whether on a cloudy day or in direct sunlight, the reticle was sufficiently bright to use at speed. But, even in direct sunlight, it’s not as bright as you might expect, and not as bright as you’d see a battery-powered dot—although the bigger reticle compensates for the dimmer illumination. Indoors, the reticle was sufficiently bright, as long as there was no more light on the target than on your optic. That means if you’re aiming out a window, or using a weaponlight, your reticle will washout and nearly disappear. The M21 had the same problem, and it was fixed by the small, optional battery-powered REM-21 illuminator that clamps onto the left side of the optic. When activated, it shines an adjustable LED onto the fiber optic coils and significantly brightens your reticle. Meprolight will be offering an illuminator for the M22 as well, and I’m told it should be available by the time of this publication. As it wasn’t available yet, I didn’t have a chance to test it, but I did get to test one of the first two polarizers imported into the country for the M22, and I highly recommend them as an accessory to improve this optic’s performance in real-world lighting conditions. Both the illuminator and polarizer are expected to be available in the U.S. in late September 2024. The polarizer screws into the end of the optic. Once installed, it has a lens which you can rotate that lowers or increases the amount of tint, from just a tiny bit to darn near blacking out your view through the window. What this tint does is make the reticle seem brighter in comparison to the background, even at lower levels, which is a good thing. It adds barely any length and less than an ounce of weight. I don’t have a price yet, but I expect it to be $50 to $75. MSRP on the M22 itself is $499. So it is bigger and heavier and more expensive than a lot of battery-powered optics, and it does have some weaknesses. With that being said, I like it and currently have it atop my truck gun because of its unique features.

A Little Context 

I’ve been evaluating the M22 as part of my (apparently endless) search to find the ultimate truck gun optic. I practically lived in my SUVs for over a decade when I was a private investigator doing surveillance in Detroit one day and rural Michigan/Ohio/Indiana the next. Way back then, I decided that having a long gun close at hand (in addition to my pistol) was a good idea.  A few years later, I found myself back in my truck, repeatedly driving back and forth across the entire country, as I refused to participate in the scamdemic and never ever wore a mask, so I couldn’t fly for two years. (Spoiler Alert: I was always right, and now everyone knows it, even if they’ll never admit it). When in sketchy areas, or travelling cross-country, it’s always good to outfit your vehicle with the proper emergency equipment. I travelled with an M4 clone for a number of years with a permanently attached muzzle device to bring it up to the 16” minimum. In the modern era, I’ve gone to a brace-equipped Daniel Defense MK18 pistol, as Michigan law doesn’t allow anyone but cops to carry a loaded rifle in their car (the magazine can’t be in the gun), but if you’ve got a CPL (concealed pistol license) a loaded AR pistol is no problem, and I can cross state lines with it at will, unlike an SBR.

But all that time in a vehicle with a truck gun has given me strong views about what would make an appropriate truck gun optic. It needs to function after being ignored for weeks or months, not lose zero even after being bounced around repeatedly, and it must survive extremes of heat and cold. I soon decided I couldn’t trust a wholly battery-powered optic, and I thought an LPVO was a little too much for a defensive carbine that would likely be used at urban/interstate distances. I’ve tried out the Primary Arms Micro Prism sight, and that’s a great option, but it somehow leaves me wanting. Trijicon’s 1.5X mini-ACOG is an incredible optic with an etched circle/dot reticle powered by tritium and fiber optics, but it is incredibly expensive, has a narrow eyepiece and tiny eyebox, and it is a 1.5X, not a true 1X. That magnification tends to slow you down inside 25 yards. However, I really like fiber-optic-illuminated optics as they are literally EMP-proof, so I was excited to try out the M22. And while it is less than perfect, it always works, is always on and with the polarizer I can embolden the reticle so it is usable in all but the weirdest lighting situations. It is bigger and heavier and not as bright as the dual-illuminated Trijicon RMR, but it’s also $135 cheaper, not including the cost of a mount for the RMR. Every optic has strengths and weaknesses, you just need to be aware of them.

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