Pulsar N550A, Pulsar Phantom Gen2+, Pulsar Sentinel Gen2 and Sightmark Gen 1 Scope
All of these units impressed me. Pulsar N550A is the only digital scope here and these were all taken by a camera phone. These pics were pretty hard to take but I wanted to keep as fair as possible. I used all of these scopes for over a week and I purchased one of them. Keep in mind all of these scopes will need a good IR light and I am glad I purchased the UNV 20 IR light. These images were taken on May 2nd and we had a full moon. The Pulsar N550A pics did not turn out as good as the unit looks and I was very impressed by how much light that unit took in. I had to turn the brightness to 4 so I could pick up the image on the camera. If I turned it up past that it would white out the image.
Left to Right
Pulsar N550A
Pulsar Phantom Gen 2+ 4x60
Pulsar Sentinel Gen2 3.5x60
Sightmark Gen1 2.5x
The lightest one I tested was the Pulsar N550A. I will add more specs later.
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Pulsar N550A no IR light was used and I was impressed on how much light it gathered compared to the traditional night vision units.
Pulsar Gen 2 Sentinel, When I took the pic it looked better than what appeared.
Pulsar Phantom Gen2+ looks exactly like the picture.
Pulsar N550A still no IR is used and the road is over 175 yards long. Pretty impressed on a full moon and the image looked much better in real life. Keep in mind the brightness was on 5 and looked much better at a higher brightness.
Sightmark Gen 1 with the UNV 20IR light. Very impressed with the clarity of that gen1 scope. Keep in mind this is optimal conditions but the edge to edge clarity looks great with that IR light.
Pulsar Phantom Gen2+ with the on board IR light turned on. The moon basically washed the IR light out.
Pulsar N550A with UNV 20 IR. This pic is a no go. The Digisight was very difficult to take pics with and the UNV 20 IR light bounced off the sign and washed the image out. I almost left this pic out but I wanted to be fair. If I had used a DVR the image would have looked much better.
Pulsar Sentinel Gen 2 with on board IR light. Not near as strong as the UNV 20 IR and the image looks just like it does in the picture.
25 yards at the end of the night to demonstrate what the Pulsar Sentinel Gen2 looks like compared to the Pulsar N550A with a DVR. There is no IR light on the Sentinel.
Pulsar N550A wanted to demonstrate what it looks like at night with no IR on and at 14 brightness. No sum light function was turned on. Looks grainy but keep in mind its trying to bring in as much light as possible with no IR source.
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Here is the unit on 7 brightness with the built in IR light on 1 power.
The images look much better with the DVR. I will be doing another test on a night with no moon with these products and a thermal unit. If anyone is looking to buy any of these type of products keep this in mind.
If you buy a digital night vision scope I cannot stress enough to go ahead and buy a good IR light. The one I purchased easily doubled the range and clarity of the digital scope. I believe with a good IR light you can get easily 300 yards at night with a digital unit. However digital is a power hog and I suggest you get a battery pack for it. The worst thing is to run out of power on a hunt at night and try and stumbling around trying to find batteries.
The Gen 2 and Gen 2+ scopes were great too. I would recommend getting a high magnified optic though. Anything over 3.5x should be fine.
I was impressed with the gen1 scope as well. When i paired it with the UNV 20 IR the edge to edge clarity was impressive.
I will update this with specs on each model and if anyone has any questions about the test please let me know.