Hello again members and guests of the forum! This week I have a new review for everyone, this weeks subject is the new SIG P210A Target by request of Passx.
As usual this review will be very picture heavy and will cover all points of the pistol in question including; The performance metrics of accuracy, speed, ease of shooting, control, misc issues and mechanical reliability. The cosmetic design and execution in fit and feel, finish quality, wear patterns, sound, and materials choice. Finally I will be sharing my thoughts on functionality in terms of ease of carry, range of uses, weight/convenience factor, maintenance requirements and finally it's effectiveness in its intended roll.
Without further ado I present to you the Sig P210 A Target in 9mm.
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PERFORMANCE: Accuracy
So this is obviously what everyone cares about, I mean this IS the 210s whole claim to fame anyway isn't it? Well to start with the most important thing is that the trigger is unlike any other gun I have ever used, this is not to say it is good or bad. Simply put this gun has the weirdest trigger I have ever used, the overall travel is just like a 1911 but the break is like a high end CZ. You start out with very little motion/takeup and soon come to a false wall that is resultant of the firing pin block disengaging, this false wall is barely noticeable and most will not even register it happening. The true wall is immediately after the false one with literally no movement to get to it, this is where things get interesting. There is no break, none, the gun simply rolls through up until you end up against the overtravel stop. I am on who is used to a gun breaking like a glass rod or having a distinct break, moving a little afterword THEN stopping against the overtravel wall. This gun just seems to drop the hammer exactly at the same time the trigger stops moving in perfect sync in a fashion that I have never experienced. In my personal opinion I do not like this at all, it makes the gun extremely hard for me to shoot since it doesn't act like any single trigger I have ever used and seemingly combines the short overall travel of a 1911, the multi-stage "walls" of a glock and the rolling break of a CZ all the while having no post break movement like a revolver. For me personally this leads to the gun shooting the first few shots randomly high but after a few hundred shots the gun calmed down for me. After I had come to terms with its truely interesting trigger the gun is not half bad, it is extremely hard to shoot in comparison to an equivalent size CZ or 1911 but is mechanically capable of accuracy nearly on the level of a custom CZ or 1911. The weight is probably a combined 4ish pounds but the actual roll to the real break feels around 3.5 to me.
The sights are odd, there are anti glare slats on the rear and the BOTTOM HALF only of the front sight that is in my opinion the worst target sight I have ever used. The sights are all glare free EXCEPT the very top of the front sight leading to again more effort than need to be able to get good groups. This was so bad that I got pissed off and bought a second type of target that allowed me to align the sights with a s***load of lines and shapes so I would not have to rely on said front sight blade at all. This greatly boosted the guns repeatability and cut group size nearly in half even with the flyers removed from the equation and produced a group I find more representative of what the gun can do mechanically at about a half inch center to center at 10 yards if the flyer is excluded. What I am saying is the gun is NOT very shootable and the sights are garbage and a huge amount of effort is required to make it work even though a target gun is supposed to hold your hand and make a bad shooter seem good, not take a good shooter to be average. I can literally without effort replicate the same or better group with my CZ Shadow 1 or 2 or Checkmate all day on a hand drawn dot on cardboard and be happy doing it, and those gun are not dedicated target guns.
Shooting quickly? Yeah good luck with that. The best I could manage was .4 second splits and the accuracy sucked and I had to put HUGE effort into making it happen at all.
All at 10 yards, note the extreme flyers present in the two eyes open shooting on the A and B that is a direct result of the trigger.
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This is when I got pissed off and bought a "cheater" target and shot one eye open.
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This is what a CZ can do with 20 rounds at the same distance, I expected this or better and it simply was not happening.
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With a gun with a sight radius this long and such large blade sights my standards for accuracy are high, I even gave this gun the advantage of being the ONLY gun I shot that day other than my 15 carry ammo shots and 8 though the .50 DE and I went out of my way to wait 45 minutes before I started shooting it and dry fired it immediately beforehand. I tried to give the gun every advantage I could unlike last week with the T3 (I went to it AFTER shooting 600 through my Checkmate) and even with the extra steps I took and a way long sight radius it was very hard to get it to perform in a fashion that aligns with the guns intent.
THAT negative rant aside the gun is mechanically very accurate and after you learn it's very strange trigger can be made to shoot well. The gun is not a speed shooting option in any way but can be made to run well for entertainment purposes at the range.
Rating: 6.5/10, This gun would have scored a 9/10 if it was not so difficult to shoot.
PERFORMANCE: Ease of shooting
The ease of shooting is about as pleasant as replacing a 2001 Mercedes E350 rear wheel hub at home without a press. By this I mean it can be worse but my god does it still take a lot of effort to make it do what you want. However, physical comfort of the gun in the hand is superb. This thing is SMOOTH unlike few guns I have ever experienced, the oversize grip fills your hand perfectly and the checkering just lightly grabs on with no abrasion whatsoever and the slide and every single control surface is so soft and polished it actually has me making comparisons in my head to high end 1911s like Ed Brown and Nighthawk in just how perfectly smooth this guns parts were forged/machined/wonder-deviced into a glass like surface.
Recoil is non-existent in terms of anything making it to your hand but the guns front end flips around like a ducks foot. Slide release is easy to hit but I prefer manually riding the slide home to experience the excellent sound the gun exhibits when loading a round in. Thumb safety is excellent in size, profile, position and smoothness of edges to provide the ideal thumb rest experience for the strong hand. Mag release is kinda hard to hit but that's okay since the mags don't drop free anyway and who cares about speed with something like this.
Rating: 9/10, Feels damn good in the hand and is easy to use as intended. If I was rating it overall and NOT just in its category as a target pistol it would be a 5/10 since it had some issues with control access.
PERFORMANCE: Speed and control
https://youtu.be/R2JRiLuOCNA
Okay now that we are done with the jokes..........This is not an easy gun to shoot quickly nor one that is easy to control at any speed. This is clearly a target gun and is balanced and sprung as such, there is zero regard to anything after the shot breaking in terms of sight tracking or recovery. Everytime you fire you will lose the sights and the large and comfortable grip setup doesn't help you point the gun back yourself as it is round and there is little directionality to its shape that would otherwise be helpful in realigning the gun as well of being naturally aware of where is pointing. Think of it as the polar opposite of a glock grip, there is no sense of knowing what the gun is doing in your hand by feel alone so you can't point shoot it and it makes recovery harder than normal. If you put several 100 through it you can sorta make it run fast, it's never going to win any races but for a target gun I guess you can call it quick. I would take a G17 any day over it though if I needed to shoot quickly.
Rating: 3/10, it's slow but acceptable for the guns role. This is no CZ, Glock, or 1911/2011 in any way, it's faster than my magnum handguns though so there's that.
PERFORMANCE: Mechanical Reliability
![Image]()
That picture sums it up well, constant stove pipes, failures to reset, and failure to feed. Take your pick it will do it at least once every 50 rounds, this is totally unacceptable reliability for any gun but is not as critical for a range toy. These issues only get worse and worse the hotter you get the gun and there comes a point where it just won't reset at all. I am going to be perfectly honest and admit these issues greatly lower my view on the gun as a whole and increases the harshness of my review dramatically. I will be having it looked at by SIG and seeing if they can fix it to the point it can actually make it 200-300 rounds so it can do its job of being a nice range gun. Gun has around 1000 on it as of now so it's not a break in issue.
Rating: 2.3/10, literally the only guns I had that were worse was a 2004 kimber compact and a TEC9 pre-ban and the TEC9 was fine with a new firing pin.
As usual this review will be very picture heavy and will cover all points of the pistol in question including; The performance metrics of accuracy, speed, ease of shooting, control, misc issues and mechanical reliability. The cosmetic design and execution in fit and feel, finish quality, wear patterns, sound, and materials choice. Finally I will be sharing my thoughts on functionality in terms of ease of carry, range of uses, weight/convenience factor, maintenance requirements and finally it's effectiveness in its intended roll.
Without further ado I present to you the Sig P210 A Target in 9mm.
PERFORMANCE: Accuracy
So this is obviously what everyone cares about, I mean this IS the 210s whole claim to fame anyway isn't it? Well to start with the most important thing is that the trigger is unlike any other gun I have ever used, this is not to say it is good or bad. Simply put this gun has the weirdest trigger I have ever used, the overall travel is just like a 1911 but the break is like a high end CZ. You start out with very little motion/takeup and soon come to a false wall that is resultant of the firing pin block disengaging, this false wall is barely noticeable and most will not even register it happening. The true wall is immediately after the false one with literally no movement to get to it, this is where things get interesting. There is no break, none, the gun simply rolls through up until you end up against the overtravel stop. I am on who is used to a gun breaking like a glass rod or having a distinct break, moving a little afterword THEN stopping against the overtravel wall. This gun just seems to drop the hammer exactly at the same time the trigger stops moving in perfect sync in a fashion that I have never experienced. In my personal opinion I do not like this at all, it makes the gun extremely hard for me to shoot since it doesn't act like any single trigger I have ever used and seemingly combines the short overall travel of a 1911, the multi-stage "walls" of a glock and the rolling break of a CZ all the while having no post break movement like a revolver. For me personally this leads to the gun shooting the first few shots randomly high but after a few hundred shots the gun calmed down for me. After I had come to terms with its truely interesting trigger the gun is not half bad, it is extremely hard to shoot in comparison to an equivalent size CZ or 1911 but is mechanically capable of accuracy nearly on the level of a custom CZ or 1911. The weight is probably a combined 4ish pounds but the actual roll to the real break feels around 3.5 to me.
The sights are odd, there are anti glare slats on the rear and the BOTTOM HALF only of the front sight that is in my opinion the worst target sight I have ever used. The sights are all glare free EXCEPT the very top of the front sight leading to again more effort than need to be able to get good groups. This was so bad that I got pissed off and bought a second type of target that allowed me to align the sights with a s***load of lines and shapes so I would not have to rely on said front sight blade at all. This greatly boosted the guns repeatability and cut group size nearly in half even with the flyers removed from the equation and produced a group I find more representative of what the gun can do mechanically at about a half inch center to center at 10 yards if the flyer is excluded. What I am saying is the gun is NOT very shootable and the sights are garbage and a huge amount of effort is required to make it work even though a target gun is supposed to hold your hand and make a bad shooter seem good, not take a good shooter to be average. I can literally without effort replicate the same or better group with my CZ Shadow 1 or 2 or Checkmate all day on a hand drawn dot on cardboard and be happy doing it, and those gun are not dedicated target guns.
Shooting quickly? Yeah good luck with that. The best I could manage was .4 second splits and the accuracy sucked and I had to put HUGE effort into making it happen at all.
All at 10 yards, note the extreme flyers present in the two eyes open shooting on the A and B that is a direct result of the trigger.
This is when I got pissed off and bought a "cheater" target and shot one eye open.
This is what a CZ can do with 20 rounds at the same distance, I expected this or better and it simply was not happening.
With a gun with a sight radius this long and such large blade sights my standards for accuracy are high, I even gave this gun the advantage of being the ONLY gun I shot that day other than my 15 carry ammo shots and 8 though the .50 DE and I went out of my way to wait 45 minutes before I started shooting it and dry fired it immediately beforehand. I tried to give the gun every advantage I could unlike last week with the T3 (I went to it AFTER shooting 600 through my Checkmate) and even with the extra steps I took and a way long sight radius it was very hard to get it to perform in a fashion that aligns with the guns intent.
THAT negative rant aside the gun is mechanically very accurate and after you learn it's very strange trigger can be made to shoot well. The gun is not a speed shooting option in any way but can be made to run well for entertainment purposes at the range.
Rating: 6.5/10, This gun would have scored a 9/10 if it was not so difficult to shoot.
PERFORMANCE: Ease of shooting
The ease of shooting is about as pleasant as replacing a 2001 Mercedes E350 rear wheel hub at home without a press. By this I mean it can be worse but my god does it still take a lot of effort to make it do what you want. However, physical comfort of the gun in the hand is superb. This thing is SMOOTH unlike few guns I have ever experienced, the oversize grip fills your hand perfectly and the checkering just lightly grabs on with no abrasion whatsoever and the slide and every single control surface is so soft and polished it actually has me making comparisons in my head to high end 1911s like Ed Brown and Nighthawk in just how perfectly smooth this guns parts were forged/machined/wonder-deviced into a glass like surface.
Recoil is non-existent in terms of anything making it to your hand but the guns front end flips around like a ducks foot. Slide release is easy to hit but I prefer manually riding the slide home to experience the excellent sound the gun exhibits when loading a round in. Thumb safety is excellent in size, profile, position and smoothness of edges to provide the ideal thumb rest experience for the strong hand. Mag release is kinda hard to hit but that's okay since the mags don't drop free anyway and who cares about speed with something like this.
Rating: 9/10, Feels damn good in the hand and is easy to use as intended. If I was rating it overall and NOT just in its category as a target pistol it would be a 5/10 since it had some issues with control access.
PERFORMANCE: Speed and control
https://youtu.be/R2JRiLuOCNA
Okay now that we are done with the jokes..........This is not an easy gun to shoot quickly nor one that is easy to control at any speed. This is clearly a target gun and is balanced and sprung as such, there is zero regard to anything after the shot breaking in terms of sight tracking or recovery. Everytime you fire you will lose the sights and the large and comfortable grip setup doesn't help you point the gun back yourself as it is round and there is little directionality to its shape that would otherwise be helpful in realigning the gun as well of being naturally aware of where is pointing. Think of it as the polar opposite of a glock grip, there is no sense of knowing what the gun is doing in your hand by feel alone so you can't point shoot it and it makes recovery harder than normal. If you put several 100 through it you can sorta make it run fast, it's never going to win any races but for a target gun I guess you can call it quick. I would take a G17 any day over it though if I needed to shoot quickly.
Rating: 3/10, it's slow but acceptable for the guns role. This is no CZ, Glock, or 1911/2011 in any way, it's faster than my magnum handguns though so there's that.
PERFORMANCE: Mechanical Reliability
That picture sums it up well, constant stove pipes, failures to reset, and failure to feed. Take your pick it will do it at least once every 50 rounds, this is totally unacceptable reliability for any gun but is not as critical for a range toy. These issues only get worse and worse the hotter you get the gun and there comes a point where it just won't reset at all. I am going to be perfectly honest and admit these issues greatly lower my view on the gun as a whole and increases the harshness of my review dramatically. I will be having it looked at by SIG and seeing if they can fix it to the point it can actually make it 200-300 rounds so it can do its job of being a nice range gun. Gun has around 1000 on it as of now so it's not a break in issue.
Rating: 2.3/10, literally the only guns I had that were worse was a 2004 kimber compact and a TEC9 pre-ban and the TEC9 was fine with a new firing pin.
