Athlon's new thermal riflescope showed up on my doorstep as I was packing for vacation.
I have not had a chance to mount it on a gun and shoot with it. I did have enough time to charge up the batteries and look at a variety of different objects to get an idea of the image quality. It is looking pretty good and battery lasts for a good while. I kept it on for several hours without any issues. I'll do a more thorough battery test when I return, but I would guess it will easily push beyond 7 hours.
This particular thermal happens to be in a shape of a conventional riflescope, so it can be mounted using any 30mm mount. Athlon supplies a pair of 30mm rings for setting it up on a conventional stock. I plan to mount it on an AR, so I will probably use a cantilevered single piece mount of some sort (or an extended riser with conventional rings, depending on what I can dig up laying around my workbench).
Typical for Athlon, the scope comes with more or less everything you need to start using it:
Inside the soft carry bag is the scope itslef, a set of rings, extra battery (there is an internal battery and a slot for a removable battery; Athlon ships it with two removable batteries), rubber eyepiece, dual battery charger, USB-C cable, Micro-HDMI cable, small power brick and documentation.
The battery goes in transversely and the battery cap is where the windage turret would be on a conventional scope. The removable batteries are of a poprietary design of some sort, so they need the attached charger to be topped off externally. I think it also gets charged inside the scope.
On the side of the eyepiece are two ports: USB-C for charging and, presumably, photo/video download and Micro-HDMI for connecting to an external screen. The external charger is also powered via USB-C.
The left-side turret (where side-focus would normally be) is digital zoom. Image focus is the large knurled ring on the objective. Eyepiece focus is also adjustable, predictably via a knurled ring that looks just like fast-focus on conventional scopes. Getting this themal scope adjusted to my eyes was pretty trivial and took a few seconds. Image focus was a little stiff at first, but got smoother quickly after a little use.
The button layout and the menu are pretty straightforward and I have not yet had a need to look through the manual. I will dig through it just in case, but so far I am happy with the ease of use.
There are four significant uncooeld thermal fabs in China. InfiRay, Guide, Dali and Hik. There may be others I do not know, but these are the largest. I have been looking at a lot of stuff iethe rmarketed or OEM'ed by iRay lately and it has generally been pretty good. The Athlon is OEM'ed by Guide and I have heard good things about their latest VGA core. I do not know which generation core is in the Athlon, but my initial take on the image quality is quite positive. If further testing does not uncover any issues, $3600 that Eurooptic wants for it might be the best deal going for a 640x480 thermal with a 50mm lens. I have seen a couple similarly configured thermals out there for similar money, but that was mostly stuff like ATN that looks good on paper, but the lens is soft and image processing is kinda half-baked. The only time I have seen better performance for the money was when something is on closeout. The new Athlon looks to be pretty decently made and optimized.
Now, before I can start recommending it, I am going to put it on a rifle, do some shooting, lay some mild abuse on it, etc. I am going to try to sneak out to Texas for a weekend in January to see if I can shoot a hog with it.
In the meantime, the most useful thing I have done with it was observation in conditions that are very rough on thermals: we had some pretty significant rain when I received the scope. Water films make it hard on thermals and the new Athlon acquitted itself very nicely.
