by crbutler on Tue Nov 28, 2017 9:45 pm
Lapua for target ammo.
Norma and Federal put out good product as well for target ammo.
Hunting ammo, Federal (with premium bullets) and Norma.
I would put Nosler and Barnes in the good hunting ammo category but they haven't been around long enough to be absolutely confident.
That is for centerfire, more rifle than handgun. The only one I recommend staying away from is Hornady. They can't stay away from fiddling with things to cut costs, and they have unacceptable rates of breaking things...and you never know if they changed something until after the fact. I have had some dangerous game ammo from them that refused to chamber in my .416 rigby which was replaced, but doesn't drive confidence there. I do reload more than use factory, but tend to buy factory for my brass supply.
Shotgun... take your pick as far as your desired pellet for hunting ammo. Kent tungsten matrix is excellent, RSI bismuth is ok, but you need to be very careful with hevishot as they market all kinds of stuff. The original and hevi13 were or are good as was their dead coyote stuff.... the rest has a proportion of steel shot. For high end lead, Federal is what I normally use, but any buffered major American ammo will be good. As far as I'm concerned, steel is crap. Black cloud is overpriced crap, winchesters hex shot patterns somewhat oddly for me, and Remington's hypersonic loads have had a bunch of recalls.
Self defense ammo for handguns...I've not had to use it, so that for me is based off recommended stuff from the media. I've used Winchester, Remington, Federal and Speer as well as corbon. Cor bon was a bit warm at times, but it functioned. Never had issues with any premium SD ammo as far as reliability, but .380 Corbon loads didn't kill a ground hog really well the one time I used it to get rid of a pest.
My experience with blaster grade ammo is very limited. I've seen lots of folks using Winchester white box in USPSA and IDPA competition, and they don't complain about it much. For that grade of stuff I use reloads for the most part, and they seem better than I recall cheap and milsurp ammo being way back in the day.
Rim fire is the odd one. It is lot sensitive. I've had reliability issues with Winchester wildcat and Remington thunderbolt, but otherwise some lots of CCI green tag or federal gold medal shoot better for me in my guns than the limited amount of lapua and eley match ammo I've tried. If you are looking for that level of performance, buy a box of everything then buy case lots of the lot that shoots best in your gun. CCI and Federal seem to always go bang for me in their cheapest iterations, while Winchester and Remington's cheap ammo tends to have 1-2/100 dud rate for me.
You need to decide quality to price.... I've shot a heck of a lot more cheap milsurp than Federal gold medal match, especially in playing around.