Night Vision Rambling what would you do thread

[GreenMushroom]

So the wife finally signed on her new job and we're ready to pick up our next device. We live in very rugged terrain with jungle like vegetation like giant ferns and shit. The brush is thick and the sight lines are mostly short. We don't hunt but our primary activity is looking for game.

Right now I run a xls pvs14 and a coti. Wife runs xls pvs14 and nox18 on neck lanyard. She only runs one device at a time due to vision issues. Right now the only pid ability we have is 3x magnifier which actually works pretty well when digiscoped with some ir.

The plan is to get her a nox35 and for me to take the 18. Also will pick up a 5x magnifier and recorder things for the nox. She is really happy with the 18 so I have the opportunity to let her keep that and get whatever I want. Figure 7-10k of slack plus whatever my pvs14/coti is worth if I wanted to blow my setup up completely.

Leaning heavily towards just getting 35 and calling it done but want to take an assessment before moving forward. I'm particularly interested in people who have a 35 and have owned other thermals in the past. We love the 18 put its the only thermal we've used outside of a coti so we lack a frame of reference. Nox stealing wife and example of local terrain for those that made it to the end.

 

[Lowdown3]

If you liked the 18, you'll love the 35! Give me a shout when your ready and we'll get you on the list.

 

[WhereNow&How]

Leaning heavily towards just getting 35 and calling it done but want to take an assessment before moving forward.

View attachment 7653771

Get the 35 but you will never be done.

You have tasted that Smokey White Devil NV and Thermal. Its addictive.

 

[jeffl838]

If you don't have long sightlines, I'd get another 18 and go for bino head mount for detection, and then magnifier + pvs14 + IR for PID

 

[GreenMushroom]

If you don't have long sightlines, I'd get another 18 and go for bino head mount for detection, and then magnifier + pvs14 + IR for PID

Another 18 was our original plan. The 35 would give us a wider range of capability even if it's not quite as good in the brush. The other thing is we plan this fall to camp out over night in some places with better site lines and the 35 will take better pics/video.

I thought the 35 was a 2x but it says 2.5x on their site. It has a pretty good field of view for that magnification. There isn't much feedback out there on the 35 yet but its similar enough to our 18 that I'm not too concerned. The downside is not having that eye of sauron 1x field of view but since we have an 18 already they should work well together.

I'm most curious to hear how the 35 works as a hand scanner as thats how it will be used most of the time. We've run the 18 on 2x more to simulate but its not really the same once you use the digital zoom. Another 18 would be the safe choice but lacks some of the potential upsides. This is why I'm trying to think the whole thing through before I pull the trigger.

 

[GreenMushroom]

Get the 35 but you will never be done.

You have tasted that Smokey White Devil NV and Thermal. Its addictive.

Well maybe a NV clip on but then I'm really done.

 

[GreenMushroom]

Been talking to one of the night goggles guys about the Bering optics phenom. Hadn't really considered it before but a phenom and a 2nd 18 would check all the boxes. A little outside the budget but could probably make it work.

 

[skinney_7]

In that terrain, it's not looking like the 35 is going to be doing a whole lot for you other than increasing your base mag, and decreasing your FOV. It also looks like you may be in higher humidity, which I've found the BAE's don't do real well in, (especially if you're wanting optimal contrast and viewing pleasure).

There's definitely a place for the higher mag, but if your not detecting, recording or looking for anything much more than 100 yards away, IMHO it's not going to do you any good and possibly hinder your objectives. I've used 18, 19, 35, 50, 60, 75, and 100mm lenses for various ranges and applications, difference in performance for each and every one.

 

[GreenMushroom]

My experience with the 18 is the combination of heat and humidity is what degrades the image. It seems to do fine in cold and humidity which we have a lot of. The more I'm thinking it over I like the phenom and 2nd 18 idea. Best of both worlds. Have to crunch the #s with the wife but I think its doable.

Cold and raining
View attachment 7654843

Hot and humid. In the 80s and very humid but not raining.
View attachment 7654844

Both pics taken during the day. No idea what the science behind it is but thats been my observation.

 

[SkyScrapin]

My experience with the 18 is the combination of heat and humidity is what degrades the image. It seems to do fine in cold and humidity which we have a lot of. The more I'm thinking it over I like the phenom and 2nd 18 idea. Best of both worlds. Have to crunch the #s with the wife but I think its doable.

Cold and raining
View attachment 7654843

Hot and humid. In the 80s and very humid but not raining.
View attachment 7654844

Both pics taken during the day. No idea what the science behind it is but thats been my observation.

Are these setting the same from out of the box, or optimized for condition?

 

[GreenMushroom]

Out of the box. I'm sure it could be improved on by messing with the settings. Honestly with all our other gear taking so much time to trial and error and adjust we just slapped a battery in the nox and started using it. To its credit it has been amazing with basically no learning curve using the factory settings. The image was degraded in the heat/humidity but detection seemed unaffected. It was still able to pick up small birds and rodents out of the brush without issue.

 

[acudaowner]

tree's were made for chopping sight lines can be your prize not to mention a lot of what could be fine wood either fire wood or lumber you could start practicing making stocks get good at it and you might never need work a day again in your life . Id take one as a gift for the idea lol

 

[kirsch]

Been talking to one of the night goggles guys about the Bering optics phenom. Hadn't really considered it before but a phenom and a 2nd 18 would check all the boxes. A little outside the budget but could probably make it work.

The Phenom is strictly a thermal scanner. For a scanner/TWS dual role, the Hogster 25 and 35 are more similar in function to a NOX, but at 384x288 res, they have a good image but not at the same quality level as the N-Vision units. The Phenom's 640 12µm image is going to be more what you are used to. Here is a video of the Phenom at over 80% humidity, and I included a picture below of how I connect a selfie stick to allow for extending the battery life to around 14 hours, plus make it easier to scan for extended periods of time. With this setup, you have zero additional cost in batteries.

I don't work with sales as I am a product tester for Night Goggles. However, last time I checked, we had Phenoms in stock and I believe we have an order in for some NOX units and other N-Vision thermals as well.

 

[skinney_7]

My experience with the 18 is the combination of heat and humidity is what degrades the image. It seems to do fine in cold and humidity which we have a lot of. The more I'm thinking it over I like the phenom and 2nd 18 idea. Best of both worlds. Have to crunch the #s with the wife but I think its doable.

Cold and raining
View attachment 7654843

Hot and humid. In the 80s and very humid but not raining.
View attachment 7654844

Both pics taken during the day. No idea what the science behind it is but thats been my observation.

There's a lot that goes into the science, I have worked with FLIR and had one of their engineers out a couple years ago collecting thermal data. I made sure and quizzed him on the subject, from temps to particles in the air from humidity or wind. We've documented numerous times very bad clarity conditions looking horizontally from ground level through the debris to our target, but once we went airborn with the thermal drone, conditions visually became noticeably better.
I've found less humidity is better, generally, however on certain nights 0 to -10, -20, -30, the clarity is much much better even with moderate humidity.

 

[Max_R]

My experience with the 18 is the combination of heat and humidity is what degrades the image. It seems to do fine in cold

Thermals (all thermals) are looking at the thermal contrast. During the day, when it's cold outside (cold air from the North), leaves, branches, etc., are warming up more under the sun than the surrounding air. This results in better images. When it's really warm and humid (warm front is coming), the effect of "solar loading" is reduced, and the temperature of everything is becoming really uniform. Result - thermals really suffer.

 

[GreenMushroom]

Heat and humidity seem to suck for all devices. On the couple of occasions we've had those conditions at night it seemed to seriously degrade our pvs14s and my coti as well. Thankfully its a rarity around here.

And again I've never played with any of the settings. It does everything we've needed it to do straight out of the box. Another factor in the foggy picture was probably that the nox hadn't been on that long. The image is good on start up but needs a few minutes and a couple nucs to get that wow factor.

 

[Glassaholic]

Not to stray too much off topic, but can you elaborate more on how humidity affects NV and thermal performance? I live in Colorado currently but in a few months am moving to the Panhandle region of Florida and curious how that may affect the gear.

 

[GreenMushroom]

I'm not the one to explain the technical side but for us the end user it degrades performance. That foggy looking picture above is worst case scenario. Hot humid with the device not warmed up.

For your 14 or binos in a place like were i live performance constantly changes anyway as you pass from sort of canopy to thick canopy or as clouds roll over. Humidity which we always have and heat degrade the image further. If you live in a desert with clear skies and lots of shiny rock and sand I'm sure NV is amazing but for me its just a vehicle for transporting my thermals around.

The nox is unaffected by most of this. We don't get the 90 degrees 90% humidity days like Florida could so all I can say is that it deals with the cold and humidity very well. The cloudy picture above is by far the worst picture I've taken with the nox and I posted it more as an oddity than a representation of performance. It was also taken during the day which seems to effect performance as well.

 

[Glassaholic]

Appreciate that GM. Interesting what you say about the NOX not being affected as much...

 

[GreenMushroom]

What i mean by that is when compared to a pvs14 it's not effected by ambient light changes. Think of it as things that degrade performance stack. With NV there are more of them. Under thick canopy sucks. Add heavy overcast suckier....no moon above overcast even suckier....add high heat and humidity to all that and you've entered the suck itself.

Thermals are only effected by heat and humidity so less stacking. The nox in particular doesn't seem to be effected by humidity by itself and you only start to lose image clarity when you add heat to the equation. One important thing I've noticed with the nox is that while image clarity can be degraded detection capability seems to remain constant. I'll post some pics in a bit from last night. Was in the 80s with humidity around 60.

 

[GreenMushroom]

Pics from last night. These are from just after dark when conditions are at there worst. Humidity was listed as 60% but it was very swampy when the sun 1st went down so I'm gonna say high 60s. Unfortunately I think we ran out of storage space or something because we took a bunch of pics later that didn't save. I went back and deleted a bunch of old stuff so should be good tonight. Have next week off so gonna flip my sleep schedule for a couple days. Kayaking is the plan tonight.

My experience is the pic taking can be a little glitchy at times but it's obviously not the primary purpose of a device like this. We've decided to get the phenom and a second 18. Going to skip the recorders for the nox. After reflection the 18 works very well for our environments and its time to seperate recreation (phenom) from tools (nox).



Swamp donkey


Chipmunk


Nox thief

 

[GreenMushroom]

Phenom showed up today. Seems like an impressive device. Just did a little looking down in the creek on the shady side of the house. I'm nervous of getting that big objective out in direct sunlight so will have to wait a few hours to have a real look around.

 

[kirsch]

Enjoy, I love mine. Let us know your impressions after you use it.

 

[GreenMushroom]

One thing I wanted to point out was your guys site and I think most of the other ones I'd looked at have it listed as a 2.5x and its a 2x. I've seen the nox 35 also listed as a 2.0 when N-vision has it as 2.5. I don't care and the mag is perfect but somebody might.

So to the device I'd say its the most performance you can get for your $ right now. Imige quality is up there with the nox and I'd assume triji and iray stuff. The image is different than the nox and I think they will compliment each other.

 

[GreenMushroom]

....

 

[Glassaholic]

I see you have a feral cat issue

 

[Choid]

Not to stray too much off topic, but can you elaborate more on how humidity affects NV and thermal performance? I live in Colorado currently but in a few months am moving to the Panhandle region of Florida and curious how that may affect the gear.

In my experience, humidity is terrible on thermal. You, for lack of any technical understanding, seem to pick up a lot of the bigger, wetter particles in the atmosphere, rather than seeing through them as you do in dry conditions. In my experience, the quality of the thermal, from shitty to way above Nox, only has a marginal effect on how well they handle stuff like frozen fog and heavy humidity. They all suck in those conditions. It isn't even so much that they suck as that they are being sensitive and picking up atmosphere, but they are pretty useless.

 

[GreenMushroom]

To add to that humidity is not always a uniform thing. Here the rain will often come in huge curtains with just sprinkles in between. Your image is essentially good up to the next curtain and seriously degraded beyond. When the east wind blows these curtains travel quite quickly so the range of your "good image" is constantly changing.

 

[kirsch]

One thing I wanted to point out was your guys site and I think most of the other ones I'd looked at have it listed as a 2.5x and its a 2x. I've seen the nox 35 also listed as a 2.0 when N-vision has it as 2.5. I don't care and the mag is perfect but somebody might.

So to the device I'd say its the most performance you can get for your $ right now. Imige quality is up there with the nox and I'd assume triji and iray stuff. The image is different than the nox and I think they will compliment each other.

The reason for the confusion is when Bering Optics originally released the Phenom, it had a 17µm sensor and the unit had 2x base mag and a 17° FOV. Earlier this year Bering released their Phenom 12µm which has a 13° FOV and has a base mag of 2.5x. If you purchased it from Night Goggles, all of our Phenoms currently being sold are the newer 12µm, 2.5x. Bering is no longer actively producing the Phenom with the 17µm sensor. However, a lot of Bering's documentation and even their website still shows the specs for the 17µm version.

 

[GreenMushroom]

Gotcha. Yeah its from you guys. They might want to look into that. Mine is listed as 2.0x and 12um. Also 12.5° fov.
It works good so whatever.