Well boys an affordable AND DECENT set of panos are in. Stick around for the wall of NVG porn, and/or for my take on it.
A little background. Argus has been teasing their panoramic night vision housing for almost a year now. Then on Jan 1st they finally announced the APNVG available for immediate sale. Shout out to my buddy Cody at Nightfalloptics for getting me one of these units/housings. Small outfit, good dude.
On nomenclature. Argus calls it the APNVG, some dealers have started to sell complete units as the "PNVG-18". Im lovingly refering to them as the real "Chynos". So for the rest of this review im gonna call it the unit or PNVGs (panoramic night vision google).
LET THE RECORDS SHOW I GOT THE GHETTO VERSION OF SOMETHING HORTA HAS AND I LIKE IT!
On to the review.
Everything this set of PNVG comes with from factory: Hard case, battery pack, battery cable, daylight/indoor training filters (day caps), and of course unit itself (MC batt pack wrap not included):
Unit in Case
Shots of the unit:
The first thing you notice about this unit is, well, its panoramic! Unit weights in at 28.25ozs complete with omni 8 L3 tubes. Quality is on par with the 1431 Mks, so it feels sturdy and 1431 mkIIs have proven to be reliable at this point.
My only concern going into this set was the optical performance. Having had 1431 MkIIs, overall quality was not a concern. I wont be diving with these or making a HALO jump. Which something tells me 99% of people in the market for these wont be considering either.
Lindu/Detyl's QTNVG came out a couple of years ago, so argus isnt the first "civ" PNVG unit on the commercial market, but Lindu's PNVG suffered from optical quality issues that made it a real trade off for the panoramic capability. I've heard Lindu has come out with a "pro" version since that purportedly solved many of the optical issues, but there doesnt seem to be many reviews.
Well after putting about 10hrs into the set this past week. I am happy to say Argus' production PNVG doesnt appear to share any of the optical issues that plagued the gen 1 Lindus. Some thru the unit pics/vid. Note last week was a waning moon so it got pretty dark in the woods.
Observations: what I really liked (optically): Eye relief of the glass was excellent, you can run the unit at max extension on a wilcox g24 and the image (while cropped by the edges of the housing) remains in focus. Eye Box was equally nice, you can run with them and the image isnt going to "cut out" on you. Resolution was also up to snuff, lines and edges of objects are nicely definely. Everything in the image looked as it should definition wise compared to milspec glass.
Now the cons (optically): There were three minor optical qualities that I noticed.
-The first was the the depth of field felt a tad shallower than milspec.
-Second, there appears to be a slight bit of distortion to the image. I noticed it when I was jogging with the unit, but its hard to describle. It's such a minor affect that Im not exactly sure what kind of distortion it is.
Link to vid if it does embed:
Your mind tells you some affect was there, but its so minor you really cant tell what it is. Did you catch it on the vid? I certainly didnt.
-Lastly, and may be a contributor to the second affect, I found there was a loss of resolution around the outer Z3 area of the glass. So you have a tree in the center of your FOV and you pan slowly until the tree hits the edge of the fov, you'll notice that the textures of the bark will appear less defined at the outer edge, I'd say around what constitutes the Z3 area. From the pictures, this loss is below the cropped area that makes up the fused image, so it doesn't actually affect performance, at least at the spliced area.
All in all, at a MSRP of $7500 (meaing a complete unit will run under 20k) this is definetly a viable and honestly quality piece of kit. As a NVG boomer, I remeber the days when you can pick any color you want as long as it was a black RNVG for "makeshifts as a bludgeoning object" reliability or a DTNVG for articulation. PVS-31As were still a mythical unicorn (props to TNVC), and forget about panos, they were a pipe dream.
Well, never in my wildest dream did I think that PNVGs would become accessible(ish) to the common man so quickly. Heres to 2024, the "Year of Panos", hopefully particualy options in the highend sector that pushes the performance of PNVGs!
P.S. I want to recongnize the article made by Vermillion China on Chinese manufacturered night vision and thermal devices. The author has some very valid points, which defiently needs to be addressed. But at the same time, I found some of the "solutions" the author suggested to be irrational, as if geopolitics does not come into play and seemingly this issue occured in a vaccum. Either way would be happy to discuss the topic in a separate thread(should someone choose to make one). But this thread should all about the panos.
A little background. Argus has been teasing their panoramic night vision housing for almost a year now. Then on Jan 1st they finally announced the APNVG available for immediate sale. Shout out to my buddy Cody at Nightfalloptics for getting me one of these units/housings. Small outfit, good dude.
On nomenclature. Argus calls it the APNVG, some dealers have started to sell complete units as the "PNVG-18". Im lovingly refering to them as the real "Chynos". So for the rest of this review im gonna call it the unit or PNVGs (panoramic night vision google).
LET THE RECORDS SHOW I GOT THE GHETTO VERSION OF SOMETHING HORTA HAS AND I LIKE IT!
On to the review.
Everything this set of PNVG comes with from factory: Hard case, battery pack, battery cable, daylight/indoor training filters (day caps), and of course unit itself (MC batt pack wrap not included):
Unit in Case
Shots of the unit:
The first thing you notice about this unit is, well, its panoramic! Unit weights in at 28.25ozs complete with omni 8 L3 tubes. Quality is on par with the 1431 Mks, so it feels sturdy and 1431 mkIIs have proven to be reliable at this point.
My only concern going into this set was the optical performance. Having had 1431 MkIIs, overall quality was not a concern. I wont be diving with these or making a HALO jump. Which something tells me 99% of people in the market for these wont be considering either.
Lindu/Detyl's QTNVG came out a couple of years ago, so argus isnt the first "civ" PNVG unit on the commercial market, but Lindu's PNVG suffered from optical quality issues that made it a real trade off for the panoramic capability. I've heard Lindu has come out with a "pro" version since that purportedly solved many of the optical issues, but there doesnt seem to be many reviews.
Well after putting about 10hrs into the set this past week. I am happy to say Argus' production PNVG doesnt appear to share any of the optical issues that plagued the gen 1 Lindus. Some thru the unit pics/vid. Note last week was a waning moon so it got pretty dark in the woods.
Observations: what I really liked (optically): Eye relief of the glass was excellent, you can run the unit at max extension on a wilcox g24 and the image (while cropped by the edges of the housing) remains in focus. Eye Box was equally nice, you can run with them and the image isnt going to "cut out" on you. Resolution was also up to snuff, lines and edges of objects are nicely definely. Everything in the image looked as it should definition wise compared to milspec glass.
Now the cons (optically): There were three minor optical qualities that I noticed.
-The first was the the depth of field felt a tad shallower than milspec.
-Second, there appears to be a slight bit of distortion to the image. I noticed it when I was jogging with the unit, but its hard to describle. It's such a minor affect that Im not exactly sure what kind of distortion it is.
Link to vid if it does embed:
Your mind tells you some affect was there, but its so minor you really cant tell what it is. Did you catch it on the vid? I certainly didnt.
-Lastly, and may be a contributor to the second affect, I found there was a loss of resolution around the outer Z3 area of the glass. So you have a tree in the center of your FOV and you pan slowly until the tree hits the edge of the fov, you'll notice that the textures of the bark will appear less defined at the outer edge, I'd say around what constitutes the Z3 area. From the pictures, this loss is below the cropped area that makes up the fused image, so it doesn't actually affect performance, at least at the spliced area.
All in all, at a MSRP of $7500 (meaing a complete unit will run under 20k) this is definetly a viable and honestly quality piece of kit. As a NVG boomer, I remeber the days when you can pick any color you want as long as it was a black RNVG for "makeshifts as a bludgeoning object" reliability or a DTNVG for articulation. PVS-31As were still a mythical unicorn (props to TNVC), and forget about panos, they were a pipe dream.
Well, never in my wildest dream did I think that PNVGs would become accessible(ish) to the common man so quickly. Heres to 2024, the "Year of Panos", hopefully particualy options in the highend sector that pushes the performance of PNVGs!
P.S. I want to recongnize the article made by Vermillion China on Chinese manufacturered night vision and thermal devices. The author has some very valid points, which defiently needs to be addressed. But at the same time, I found some of the "solutions" the author suggested to be irrational, as if geopolitics does not come into play and seemingly this issue occured in a vaccum. Either way would be happy to discuss the topic in a separate thread(should someone choose to make one). But this thread should all about the panos.
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