As another year comes to a close, I can't help but sit back and reflect a little bit. In terms of politics, you sorta know where I stand. There is no real mystery there and not all that much left to discuss. The scary sounding omicron variant of COVID is proving to be a non-issue just like sane people predicted when it first popped up. It will not stop the corporate media talking heads and booger eating morons in Washington from losing what little is left from their ever-loving minds, but there is nothing I can do about that.

I am, yet again, sitting in an airport waiting for my flight. I do a preposterous proportion of my writing while at the airport or on the plane. I can't say I am happy about it, but that's my life, I suppose. All this time spent travelling really cuts into how much time I can dedicate to recording videos. I really hope to rectify that in the coming year.

As we get into the holiday season, I will somewhat detach myself from current events assuming that even our erstwhile political leaders will be elsewhere pre-occupied over the holidays (i.e. they won't bungle up anything new), but you never know. If something interesting pops up, I'll post it, but I sure hope not. Then again, every time I go on a political sabbatical, however short, thinking that there is no possible way for something even stupider than the current nonsense to happen, I get unpleasantly surprised.

There are several semi-philosophical essays I want to finish (along the veins of "Beware of the Experts" that I published a while back). The first one will probably be on wisdom as a concept. Wisdom is one of the least used, most misused and sorely needed words in our modern vocabulary. It will, again, be an adaptation of something I wrote three years ago when I had an inkling to publish a collection of essays. I think it needs a lot of refinement though. We are going on a family trip to Idaho next week and I plan to finish it while there.

In terms of guns and optics, my plate is absolutely overflowing with reviews I am looking to finish and there are several I really want to get done with before SHOT. Wish me luck.

At the end of every year, I try to look back and see what was truly memorable in terms of the development of sporting optics. It varies from year to year, but in 2021, the most memorable thing was probably a litany of supply chain issues that started in 2020 and barely abated in 2021. Many companies struggled to introduce anything new, but a few interesting things did happen.

Unsurprisingly, Vortex' introduction of Razor HD-LHT 4.5-22x50 riflescope is at the top of my list. There is nothing revolutionary about this design except it is a new take on optical compromises. It is as perfect of a crossover hunting/precision riflescope as exists today because of how competent it is without being heavy. I have talked about it incessantly for the majority of the year and I have no intention of stopping. It absolutely kicks ass on my 308 Fix and I had the honor of being the first person to take it hunting and take an animal with it (aoudad sheep in April for those who are new to this community). I have the MRAD version: https://bit.ly/3mbUNGs
Keep in mind, given what I do here, that I can get my hands on any scope in any price range and this is the one that sits on my favourite rifle.

With LPVOs, I can't help but point out that March's dual focal plane 1-10x24 Shorty (https://bit.ly/3qpHF1N) is probably the first successful dual focal plane reticle design with magnification going down to 1x. I'll have a review up on the latest version with a tree reticle shortly, but, as it stands, with its side focus and excellent reticle visibility, this is likely the best general purpose AR-15 scope on the market today. More on that later, but I am quite impressed with what I am seeing so far. If I was forced to choose just one LPVO to use for everything this would be it. The way March designed the objective, mounting this scope is not ideal, but it is workable. Optomechanically, it is excellent and its versatility is really unmatched, at least among the scopes that are available to civilians.

With heavy precision scopes, everything I have seen this year has been somewhat evolutionary in nature. The whole market segment has become increasingly competent, but I expect things to get a lot more interesting after SHOT.

With thermal and night vision devices, interesting things have been happening. Not so much with night vision, to be honest, but there has definitely been a lot of movement with commercial thermal devices. All of a sudden, increasingly competent thermal scopes, clip-ons and monoculars can be had in $3k to $5k range. I started looking at a few and I will probably end up with a fairly complete market overview by summer 2022. So far, Leica's handheld monocular and Burris' clip-on (I have the 50mm version: https://bit.ly/3E1bb2w) seem to stand out to me, but there is a lot more to look at. I am going to set-up another hog hunt, likely in March, and use that as a platform to look at a bunch of thermal devices. All of the $5k and under thermal products out there mostly use various Chinese uncooled imaging cores and the big thing for me is how competent these are becoming. In terms of pure imaging performance, N-Vision and Trijicon using BAE cores still have an edge, I think. If I were forced to choose one general purpose thermal scope to settle on, I would still spend the money and pick up N-Vision Nox35 (https://bit.ly/3qa1XMk) or Halo-XRF (https://bit.ly/3sckPgt), most likely. However, the gap is narrowing and it is worth investigating. It is an occasionally confusing incestuous market segment, so I have my work cut out for me.

With conventional night vision devices (i.e. image intensifiers), we have several very mature products and I do not see any major changes happening. Arguably the most interesting thing, and this is more of a professional interest for me, is that several manufacturers have made good progress in making fairly high resolution SPAD image sensors. SPAD stands for "Single Photon Avalanche Diode". In a SPAD image sensor, each pixel is able to significantly amplify single levels for superior low light imaging. Canon is commercializing a 3.2MP SPAD image sensor. They are obviously not doing it for anything weapon related and it is still not sensitive enough to replace IITs, but it can make what we call "digital night vision" truly useful. It is on my list to figure out how much it is projected to cost when it is out next year. Then again, twenty years ago when I first started working with these things, everyone was convinced that digital night vision will displace traditional IITs any moment now and I am still waiting.

Now that I think about it, I realize that I promised to make a couple of educational videos on thermal and night vision devices a while back. I should really get on it...