Sometimes I wonder if I am getting a little too old for all the time I spend on the plane, but that's a problem for another day. I'll have plenty of the opportunities to whine about it. In the meantime, after measly 24 hours spent on the planes and in airports, I am back home and, again, jetlagged out of my mind. I wonder if "always jetlagged" qualifies as a lifestyle...
While I try to get my brains unscrambled, I looked at my very messy office to see what I should be reviewing next (aside rom releasing videos that are already recorded). I have a bunch of various optics in there and half the time I just pick whichever one is at the top of the pile to review first.
There are a few write-ups and videos coming up both in terms on electro-optics and more traditional stuff. It is all pretty heavily biased toward riflescopes though. I have a lot less here in terms of observation optics, but there are still a few yet to be wrapped up with.
Now, if you have been here for a bit, you have heard about all of the stuff I have been looking at to some degree. I have a habit that manufacturers of various optical devices find absolutely infuriating: I prefer to spend a LOT of time with various optics before I issue final reviews. Now, I do talk about them a little as I put them through their paces, but I take my sweet time before I decide whether it can be recommended. I have quite a few scopes here that are getting to the point where I should be wrapping up with them. Once I do, I'll get a new batch of products to look at.
One thing that is new here, however, is a night vision monocular from Photonis: PD PRO 16M.
A couple of years ago I promised to start looking seriously into electro-optics and this is a part of that. I started with thermals and, honestly, to a good degree that is still going to be be the bulk of it. There has been more innovation and development happening with thermals, and prices there have really been going down. Burris Clip-on that I use quite a lot can usually be found around $3k (https://bit.ly/3E1bb2w) or lot less if you have mil/LE/ExpertVoice. Higher spec Bering thermals like the one I did a livestream on a couple of weeks ago are in the $4k to $5k range. With anything containing IITs (Image Intensifier Tubes) of good image quality, it is not going to be cheap. When I say good image quality, I am talking about Gen3 or better. Why do I start at Gen3? For a couple of reasons. Personally, I would take it even further and for my own use I would not pay for a night vision device that is not autogated (i.e. adjusts to a range of night time lighting conditions). Even without that, modern digital night vision performance is getting sufficiently good that anything below Gen3 is seriously threatened. Some of the demos I saw at this year's industry trade show I go to for my work looked like it would match the imaging performance of Gen3 or at least be very close. Digital night vision sorta developed a bad name for itself because there was so much crap released on the market early, but there have been plenty of very serious companies steadily working on improvements. There were three that I was truly impressed with back in April and I fully expect at least one of them to get cracking with commercially available solutions. Digital night vision has a ton of advantages from the standpoint of making something affordable, so now that they have the technology part worked out (which they seem to have), it is only a matter of time before we see these for sale. Does that mean you should not be investing into conventional IIT based night vision at this stage? Not at all, but if you do, get something nice. In other words, at the moment, I have no plans to review any of the lower end night vision goggles or monoculars that are not digital. Even with those, I plan to only look at the nicer stuff.
I had to start somewhere, though, and the first part was to think through what kind of a night vision device I am generally interested in.
As with thermals, there are essentially three varieties to think about:
-Standalone observation (monocular or binocular)
-Standalone weapon mounted (riflescope)
-Clip-on

For my personal use, as with thermals, I am primarily interested in handheld and clip-on use. For a dedicated hunting rifle, I freely admit that a normal thermal or night vision scope is the most efficient solution, but something in me rebels from having a better powered sight only on a rifle.
I did want the most flexibility, so I decided to start with a handheld monocular, which brings me to this particular Photonis product. It can be used in three distinct ways: handheld, helmet mounted and weapon mounted. The weapon mounted part is interesting in that it has to be set up BEHIND a day optic that has a reticle designed to work with NV, i.e. very dimly illuminated, I plan to experiment with it behind Vortex' Gen2 UH-1 that has a couple of night vision settings.
With thermals, for obvious reasons, the clip-on has to be in front of the day optic. With night vision, clip-ons that are designed to be used with magnified optics (riflescopes) have to be in front of the day optic as well. However, with holographics and red dot sights that are designed for it, the night vision monocular can be behind the optic. To a significant degree that is simply a function of the flexible eyerelief non-focusing optics provide. The night vision monocular essentially ends up set-up where a magnifier would normally be and Photonis makes a flip mount for the PD PRO specifically for that purpose.
If you plan to use a monocular to look through a day optic, there are a few things to keep in mind which is also what got me interested in Photonis.
With IITs, there are really three main manufacturers:
-L-3 and Elbit are in the US
-Photonis is in France

Photonis tubes are used by several other Euro companies presumably because L-3 and Elbit have a hard time exporting them out of US. Now, I am sure there are other IIT manufacturers out there. I know Russians make their own, mostly subpar tubes. There are also several manufacturers of similar devices intended for scientific use, but they are not packaged for the handheld of weapon mounted products we are talking about.

While all of the currently produced image intensifier tubes work in largely similar ways, they are optimized differently. With optics, everything is compromise and electro-optics are not different.

US based IITs tend to lean toward very high gain, but that often results in somewhat higher EBI (equivalent background illumination) and more prominent halos around bright objects. That approach really works well when it is truly dark without any obvious illumination sources around. Honestly, modern high performance L-3 tubes just work well all around, but they are pretty hard to come by and for the specific things I am interested in Photonis 4G tube that I got might be a better fit.

Photonis takes a somewhat different approach to the way they make their products and one of the things I find most appealing is the broader spectral response compared to most other tubes out there. While on paper, Photonis has a little less gain than typical L-3 or Elbit tubes, the EBI is extremely low and spectral response is extremely wide. Traditionally, IITs are optimized for the NIR (Near InfraRed) spectral region that is just outside the wavelengths of light we can see with the naked eye. In practical terms that means approximately 600 to 900nm wavelengths for most of them (human eye visible range is roughly 400nm to 650nm). Photonis' 4G tubes extend that spectral range quite far: down to 400nm and up above 900nm by a good bit. That means that while pure light amplification ratio might be a little less (though still very high by historical standards), 4G tubes have a lot more light to work with both from natural and artificial sources. Halos also seem to be exceptionally well controlled.
In other words, when selecting a night vision device, many people focus on FOM (resolution multiplied by SNR) and while that is a very important metric, it does not tell the whole story. To choose an appropriate night vision device for your use, I suggest going with the whole story.
If none of this makes sense, please let me know and I'll see if I can squeeze in a livestream on what all the different night vision specifications mean. That should clear things up.
In the meantime, I'll do some testing with the Photonis 4G monocular I have here and let you know how it stacks up.