Thermal red-dot sight! Holosun DRS-TH. This would be awesome in the woods at night.

mcb

mcb

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https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cnk5Zfzqw1A
The link it to Dustin from Top Shots instagram page. Best video of the sight I could find.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog...tm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
A bit more info on the TFB.


Holosun has a red dot sight that on the same lens that shows the aiming reticule also project a matching thermal image overlay. Steiner came out with a very similar sight a few years ago but it was 5 figure expensive. The base model of this is suppose to be $1600 and even the high end pro model is only $2300. There is also a Night Vision based version but the thermal Version is what I would want.

Hopefully you can change the color pallet to something other than green because being Red/Green color blind I loose the red reticule real easy in the green highlights.
 
So, here is the deal with this sort of heads-up sort of holosight that is thermal or fuses thermal with daylight (clear channel) imagery. They have limited utility.

I have hunted with the Sig Echo and the InfiRay Fast FAL 19 that have similar configurations. One of the things people complain about with these sorts of sight is the lack of light control. They will illuminate your head and shoulders quite nicely. So if stealth is your thing, these are not the sights for you.

Torre Pines made some smaller versions that were pretty interesting, but useless, unless you were looking for something to fabricate into magic decoder ring with thermal capability, the Torre Pines stuff was just junk.

You mentioned Steiner's from a few years ago at SHOT. That was a fusion of blending clear channel with a thermal image overly. Notice they didn't make it to market. There are undoubtedly numerous reasons why, but if I was to guess based on their other thermals I have seen/used, Steiner does not have its act together with thermals. The Steiner Cinder was a handheld thermal that went from full retail to clearance selling by Steiner in a matter of weeks. The S35 rifle scope is nearly as bad as the Cinder, but for different reasons. I was able to document reticle position shift on the S35 when cycling through the gradient of magnification changes, which were at 0.1x increments. So not only did it take a long time to zoom, but the reticle jumped around on the screen and was not always overlaying the same spot in the image.

Where these may shine is in daylight, but under a canopy where you need a little help seeing better and when the backlight aspect will be mostly or totally nullified by the daylight conditions.

You mentioned the green/red issue. It should have a non-tinted palette. The green color is meant to help preserve your personal night vision as well as being less bright to illuminate you, but it will still illuminate you.
 
Double Naught Spy said:
One of the things people complain about with these sorts of sight is the lack of light control. They will illuminate your head and shoulders quite nicely. So if stealth is your thing, these are not the sights for you.
Click to expand...

The bellow/eye cup certainly helps in this area and keeps you from having both eyes blinded by the light, when you look away from the screen.

As always more options and offerings are just going to keep the price going down, so I am glad they have introduced them.
 
Good point @Double Naught Spy, I had not though about the image lighting up your face. For night armadillo hunting I don't think that would be an issue but it certainly could be a problem with coyotes. It will be interesting to see how much you can turn down the image brightness. Even better would be a momentary switch of some type so the display is only on when you want it. I still think this optic will be useful for me and the price point is attractive assuming it works as good as it looked in that video by Dustin.

The Steiner did make it to market. I was referring to the Steiner CQT. But its $10k, though Optics Planet has it on sale for $7500. Yes Steiner is not a healthy company at the moment. A former college of mine worked there for about year before moving on. He did not have nice things to say about Steiner as a company to work for.
 
Oh, did it make it to market? I had no idea. I know of zero folks who got one of those. Thanks for clarifying. I don't know the exact model, but the one I was thinking of was

For dillo hunting, yeah, stealth won't be an issue. I was thinking more of hog/coyote hunting where it might be an issue.
 
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Interesting. The MSRP is pretty reasonable as well. Might get me into NV or IR night hunting.
 
herrwalther said:
Interesting. The MSRP is pretty reasonable as well. Might get me into NV or IR night hunting.
Click to expand...

You can get into digital NV night hunting for less than a grand and be set to 300 yards or more, but you have to deal with an IR light (Think Sightmark 4k mini) or you can get into thermal with an inexpensive weapon sight such as the Bering Optic Hogster Stimulus for about $1500. There are a couple other options, but if you didn't realize it, prices have dropped quite a bit on the lower end stuff.
 
So, on a YouTube channel I was watching, they said per specs the effective range of the thermal is 68 meters. If that is accurate, seems like it'd have very limited utility.
 
BigBL87 said:
So, on a YouTube channel I was watching, they said per specs the effective range of the thermal is 68 meters. If that is accurate, seems like it'd have very limited utility.
Click to expand...
I saw that too, i would be interested to see how they came to that. It's not like something in the physics limits the range of an infrared sensor to something that short. It has to be done weird combination of sensor resolution, 1x magnification, and some arbitrary feature size resolution metric. I have a Seek Thermal infrared camera that plugs into my phone. It's very low solution and so that limits the ranges you can identify what a "hot" target is despite it showing up. A deer at 200 yards is just a couple bright pixels.
 
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