It is easy to get caught up in Brand names no matter what your shopping for.
I used a $800 plus Leupold VX III 6.5-20 on my Varmint rifle and a $150 UTG 6-16 on my PTR yesterday. They are both great scopes, is the Leupold a nicer scope , YES. Does the UTG get the job done with room to spare,, YES. The Leupold is also Made In the USA, not all their products are, but many of the rifle scopes are.
Will you be disappointed with a really cheap scope? Probably. But value is in the eye of the beholder. Some times you have to step back from the interweb chatter and decide for your self what is just group think from people just parroting what they read or what really makes sense. As we all know you could spend the next 6 months reading about optics and be no closer to making a good choice.
The shooting range I have been frequenting has a new board with names and details of people who have hit the 1000 yard gong, there was a dozen or so people up there, but there was only 4 brands of scopes on the board. Nikko, SSA,Vortex and US Optics. (That is Nikko, not Nikon). Just food for thought. There was more Nikkos then the other brands. It could be that this was a club (Probably Marines from Pendelton) who shoot together and maybe that explains why there are so many Nikkos, but it is hard to argue with results however it happened.
Nikon has a long history of making good lenses, I have nothing against Nikkon. I am a big fan of leupold and I try to buy US made product when ever I can. If you have a local company that makes optics I would understand wanting to support that as well.
If I were you, I would be thinking about what conditions I was likely to be hunting in, how much light there is, what the ranges are and start with what model scopes fit that and worry about the Brand secondly.
For example I have 22lr Target Rifle, I put a Leupold 3-9x40 (1" tube) scope on there many, many years ago. The other day I was thinking about how I had it set on 9 power and could not recall shooting it on any other setting. Maybe I had way back when I got it, but at this point 3-8 power seemed pointless. So now I am thinking I probably would have been better off just getting a fixed power scope that let in a little more light. I am thinking a good 10 power, 50mm Objective with a 30mm tube would have served me better. Dollar for Dollar I could have done better. Of course hind sight tends to be 20/20. If I was looking for fixed 10 power scope, I doubt I would have picked a Leupold. So you might want to ask yourself if you are ever going to shoot a deer with your rifle on 3x power? Maybe you are? I have no idea what your going to do, but you probably do.
So anyways you might want to think about it from the stand point of the conditions first. The older I get the more I enjoy a nice big clear image regardless of the the power of magnification.
Here is a write up comparing the Mueller to several other scopes. Mueller
http://www.snipercentral.com/muellertac.htm
Reviews
http://www.opticsplanet.com/reviews/reviews-mueller-optics-3-9-x-40mm-sport-dot-series-water-proof-rifle-scope.html
