I'm trying out the Luna Optics LN-G3-M50 now. This is a digital night vision monocular. They call it "Gen 3" but that is meaningless marketing wrt digital sensors. It works as advertised.
The unit has a focusable IR illuminator with three power levels. The ability to control power and focus the illuminator from flood to spot is extremely useful as it doesn't blitz nearby objects. On high, it lights up my entire canyon. With no IR, the stars, my god, the stars!
The illuminator is 850nm which is visible to some wildlife. I have a 940nm flashlight which I will try with the monocular.
The optics are sharper than the sensor so acceptable. The 50mm glass objective is heavy but gathers more light than smaller models. It has manual focus which is probably for the best as one doesn't have to fight an autofocus picking the wrong subject. The optical zoom is fixed at 6x. There is a digital zoom feature to 36x but I haven't played with it. It just crops so is probably pointless. Near focus is about 4m.
The sensor is just okay. It's about what I expected. Higher resolution would mean a bigger sensor (more money and weight) or smaller pixels (poorer performance) so the tradeoff is fair. Video recording works better than some reviewers suggested. I use IR wildlife cameras so I'm used to the limitations wrt fast moving objects.
The LCD display is one spot that could stand improvement. The manufacturer cheaped out with a low quality display (or more likely, a low quality chip driving the display). The unit has several color schemes for displaying the output, all of which interfere with normal night vision even on lowest brightness. The amber scheme is the least offensive in this respect. The diopter adjustment works well.
I haven't tried the wifi output to a phone yet.
The controls are well thought out with physical buttons and knobs for the most commonly used adjustments.
The unit is fairly large and front heavy. It has a tripod mount that I still have to try.
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