My wife and I both run identical Warren Tactical sights on our Glocks with a fiber optic front and black rear. As I was swapping out my fiber optic rod today, I thought it would be a good day to test red vs green since I run green and she runs red. I gave her gun a fresh fiber optic rod as well to make it a fair comparison. I tried them both at different times of the day, different lighting conditions, and using different flashlight methods. Granted, this is only one guy's experience and limited to the way my eyes see, but may be helpful to others that have forsaken night sights like I have.
1. Bright daylight in the back yard, sunny day. Both the red and green glowed pretty bright and it was hard to say which I preferred. I could see scenarios where you would chose based on the targets you are shooting that day. I finally decided I preferred the green, my wife still preferred the red.
2. Dusk, sun starting to go down in the back yard. Green started to win here, to my eyes it was noticeably brighter but not by a huge margin.
3. Indoors, standing under a fluorescent light (kitchen). They both glowed fairly bright. the red stood out a tiny bit more to me than the green.
4. Indoors, standing under LED bulbs (living room with ceiling fan light). Similar to the kitchen lights, both were highly visible with a slight edge to the red.
5. Indoors, standing in a lit room sighting to a dark room (lit kitchen, lights out in the living room). Green and red were equal to me in this regard. This time I was not directly under the light source. Instead, I was standing right where the useable light ended like I was approaching the darker area.
6. Indoors, standing in a dark room looking into a lit room (reverse of no. 5 scenario). The green shot WAY ahead in this situation. The green dot was clearly visible and looked like a slightly dimmer tritium dot. The red was not visible and looked like a black front sight post.
7. Dark room, no ambient light, Streamlight Nightfighter flashlight using FBI technique. Both the red and green were visible picking up the ambient light of the flashlight. If the flashlight's beam was right behind the sight, then the red was slightly easier to pick up. If the beam was farther away from the point of aim, the green was brighter than the red.
8. Dark room, no ambient light, Streamlight Nightfighter flashlight using Surefire "syringe" technique. The green was fairly brightly lit, the red was invisible and appeared as a black front sight post. Harries technique produced the same results.
9. Dark room, no ambient light, Streamlight Nightfighter flashlight using neck and temple index techniques. Both red and green were very visible, the red slightly more so.
10. Dark room, no ambient light, Streamlight TLR-1 light mounted on the rail. The green was fairly brightly lit, the red was invisible and appeared as a black front sight post. An interesting thing here is the green almost appeared to be a white dot.
11. Dark room, ambient light from a big screen LCD TV. Both colors picked up the ambient light, green was noticeably brighter in all directions. When aiming towards the TV, red was barely visible and green was brightly lit.
I'm sure there are lots more scenarios to go over, but this was all I got through today. My conclusions:
Outside in sunlight it is strictly user preference on which is better. Indoors it seems that red shows up a tiny bit better when either backlit with good light or directly underneath a light source. Green is much better at grabbing ambient light farther away and is miles ahead at grabbing ambient light in front of the muzzle. I felt green was overall more useful in low light and was useable with more types of flashlight techniques. I could see how some competition shooters would prefer red for certain targets. Red might be better overall for a gun that is mainly carried in daytime, like a day shift duty weapon where there is sunlight and indoor lighting everywhere.
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