In my area I haven’t had major issues with the TAD presets, but I admit I haven’t run it on an all-nighter in bad weather yet. I suspect it will work better in some regions than others.
Night Vision Safran TAD
- Thread starter Dogtown
- Start date
I never pressed either in tough conditions - just dry high desert air or comparatively humid coastal conditions. Admittedly, I spent way too long running both with Brightness set too high, inducing all kinds of problems that I blamed on the unit when in fact it was operator headspace & timing.
I just know people who have run them on the same set of binos and preferred the PAS29B's ability to filter, better. Regardless, this whole shoddy roll-out wasn't it for me. My PAS29B arrives tomorrow.
Okay, so I have spent about 20 minutes with my PAS29B. I have not tested ALL the things, as the menu and options is far more complex than the TAD. However, a few things:
-EVERYTHING WORKS! It powers on. It doesn't get stuck. The ABC works very well.
-Again...EVERYTHING works! The menu has no dead-ends like the TAD (See: Anti-lag), in the PAS29B, anti-lag works, and works well. Moving my head as fast as is sensible, my dog about 20m away blurred a hair, but "stayed in place pretty well". With the TAD, or PAS29B with AL-off, the dog would "move" his length back and forth whipping your head side to side.
-The buttons and overall "feel" of the unit is SOLID. It just feels like an MB or Audi compared to a Honda. I'm sure the buttons function the same, but they just feel better on the PAS29B. It just feels better made.
-Image quality is about the same as far as I can tell. The higher res, etc. of the TAD isn't making a difference at 1x through a tube. Even a really good tube.
-You CAN take thermal snap-shots and you CAN review them/look at them like a slide show through your NVD. You can also delete them so you won't risk filling up your 10,000 shot hard drive with nonsense.
Overall, I really wished I had just foregone the entire TAD experience. This is superior.
-EVERYTHING WORKS! It powers on. It doesn't get stuck. The ABC works very well.
-Again...EVERYTHING works! The menu has no dead-ends like the TAD (See: Anti-lag), in the PAS29B, anti-lag works, and works well. Moving my head as fast as is sensible, my dog about 20m away blurred a hair, but "stayed in place pretty well". With the TAD, or PAS29B with AL-off, the dog would "move" his length back and forth whipping your head side to side.
-The buttons and overall "feel" of the unit is SOLID. It just feels like an MB or Audi compared to a Honda. I'm sure the buttons function the same, but they just feel better on the PAS29B. It just feels better made.
-Image quality is about the same as far as I can tell. The higher res, etc. of the TAD isn't making a difference at 1x through a tube. Even a really good tube.
-You CAN take thermal snap-shots and you CAN review them/look at them like a slide show through your NVD. You can also delete them so you won't risk filling up your 10,000 shot hard drive with nonsense.
Overall, I really wished I had just foregone the entire TAD experience. This is superior.
Yeah, there's something to be said for the simplified menu in the TAD. I used to spend so much time trying to cycle through the three main menus in the E-COTI and getting frustrated because it's a bit unintuitive. But man oh man, having more control over the image processing than just presets is really nice.
I'm still curious if we'll see a next-gen E-COTI at some point in the coming years.
I'm still curious if we'll see a next-gen E-COTI at some point in the coming years.
We will, but it'll be a while is my guess. One quirk I do note about ecoti, is that at very low brightness (auto turned off, manual less than 3, or auto on, moonless or overcast night in a valley or a dark room), there appears to be some low light monitor flicker to the text and image. Some people may not notice it, but it reminds me of being able to "see the frames", or PWM in an led flashlight, although no lag in image is seen here. I think pas29b may use rapid cycling for extra dim imaging. Just a curiosity.
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Safran says it's normal. I asked them what causes it in the lower brightness settings. I believe it's likely that the PAS29B uses a PWM system to manage brightness, in which case this would be typical.
The screen cap feature is pretty cool. Screen cap reviewed indoors and photographed.
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After using my PAS29b some more, I've come to a few conclusions:
-The "Normal programmed modes" are pretty darn good. The only one I mess with is Arctic, I will up the gain to -2 to -4. I don't think Safran made a bad call removing this feature though honestly. It's of minimal use when the programmed modes are so "on".
-The anti-lag feature is pretty darn good. I hope it makes it into the TAD.
-The "Normal programmed modes" are pretty darn good. The only one I mess with is Arctic, I will up the gain to -2 to -4. I don't think Safran made a bad call removing this feature though honestly. It's of minimal use when the programmed modes are so "on".
-The anti-lag feature is pretty darn good. I hope it makes it into the TAD.
Safran/O1 has had a lot of pressure put on them to sort this. I am confident it isn't getting back burnered. So much so that I bought my original TAD back, now that I have a pas29b for the interim, and do appreciate some of what TAD brought to the table.Ok, now I'm getting frustrated. Safran has had my TAD since early Dec and while comms have been pretty frequent, I still have no estimate for when I'll get it back. I never should have sold my E-COTI
100% this. Once you try fusion, it's hard to imagine going back to plain I^2.
So it sounds like Safran is finally at the end stage with the TAD updates. The randomly scrolling screen seems to have only affected about 1% of the first batch, so it was the most difficult issue to track down. Everything else sounds like it's sorted, and just to be safe, they're recalling all of them from that first batch (regardless of issues) to get them all updated to the latest greatest.
Do I need to send mine back again lol? I’ve had it back for like two months, I don’t wanna hear they are still fixing gremlins.
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