X2.....if goal is putting together a dope book for long distance shooting. The ability to click it in vs. Kentucky windage. Shoot at the various distances with ammo being used and then measure drop and convert that to clicks. In real world, that would be more accurate than a ballistic calculator. And if this is for shooting targets, it's all good. But if for hunting....... now you are getting into the ethics of trying to make a clean kill shot way out there. A lot of guys have done it and there are some pretty impressive claims of shots made, but for every one of those there have probably been a lot more wounded and lost game animals. Not only from accuracy of the shot, but the bullet starts loosing punch way out there. You might hit em, but not kill em.

Primary use of a chrony I'm aware of is load development geared towards most accurate ammo possible. All that revolves around finding a load that gives most consistent muzzle velocity such that the drop way out there is the same. All the bullets fall on same horizontal plane. Several ways of getting there, but that is the goal.

And Garmin xero, which is a little gizmo the size of a pack of cigarettes has pretty much made all others obsolete. It uses doppler radar and somehow is able to separate the bullet from muzzle blast to give highly accurate readings. Never felt the Caldwell types were accurate enough to be useful much beyond getting you in the ballpark of how fast bullet was going when it left.

Yes, this little thing makes it easy. I will never use my old Caldwell again. No more setup with a tripod and trying to shoot through the right spot. Just set this on your bench and shoot.

Poor man's chrony is to get bullets on target at 100 yards, then move targets out to 300 yards min, then shoot at least 5 shots per group. Distance magnifies the results. Best group wins, and especially if groups tend to string horizontally.

Yes, the calculators are usually plenty good enough for hunting out to 500, but depending on the accuracy of the bullet manufacturers published ballistic coefficient and probably other factors I'm unaware of, they may or may not be accurate at longer ranges. They give you a good starting point and if I check where I am hitting at 700 and tweak the input to match they are usually pretty good out to around a thousand. I've never checked past there but if you are going to shoot further than that you probably need to be checking and tweaking stuff at increasingly closer intervals, because you are starting to get a lot of drop fast at that range.