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I'm not too proud to get schooled if I learn something solid from the experience.
At SHOT Show, I stopped by the Trijicon booth (a company known for making combat-proven optics) and looked through their Credo LPVO, and it had that image shift issue I was describing. The effect was greatly reduced when looking through the Credo with the tube upside down! I asked a Trijicon technical staffer to explain this to me, but they shrugged and said they didn't know what I was talking about.
I reached out to my friend, Dark Lord of Optics. There were too many confounding factors for him to diagnose the situation based on just my photos and videos. He suspects that I may not have adjusted the diopter properly for the camera (which I disagree). It could also be that the reticle and turrets were not optically centered or the elements were not assembled correctly.
I asked him if scope makers check for this issue at the factory. He said that scope factories center the turrets mechanically, but do not test for optical center. One thing that never occurred to me was that FFP (and some SFP) reticles are etched onto the lens and that the turrets move the reticle crosshairs by moving the entire lens. I tested one of the LPVOs that I thought had an image shift "out of the box". I turned the turrets and discovered that it also shifted the overall image. This is only noticeable at 1x, which is why I only noticed this "defect" in LPVOs!
So the Trijicon Credo I looked at at SHOT Show probably wasn't defective. There are hundreds of people touching and messing with the demo scopes at the expo. Somebody who was testing out the demo optic may have turned the turrets a rotation or even two. Even if they reset the turret number to "0" the image I was wasn't optically, visually centered.
Now I know. And as G.I. said, knowing is half the battle.
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