I think you sort of answered your own question by saying you used the Photon instead if the thermal

In the last two years I can tell you how many times I've done that - ZERO !

Of course I use a full size scanning thermal which is 5 times the cost of the Leupy.

That'd be nice, but I'm over budget as it is on nv equipment.

Agreed, if you're pocketing your thermal you've proven that it's not of much value for the task at hand. Save your pennies for a pulsar thermal and you won't regret it. Many good unit will come up used soon as pulsar moves into their new line.

I bought one to use for tracking wounded animals. It works great for that and saved me lots of time. It isn't a good for scouting or searching for game. It is awesome for looking for wounded game in the dark. The best thing about it is my eyes adjust quickly after looking through the imager.

The pulsar thermals are really the logical next step. The difference in clarity from the flir scout tk and likely the leupold (haven't look through it yet) would be a significant.

Flir is coming out with the q-14 which will retail around 1500. It's supposed to be the "game changer" so I'm going to wait and see.

The new Q14 should be awesome. Retail will be around 2k for the 320 core and 4 for the 640. Street price slightly less most likely.

I'll hopefully find out some more info from FLIR soon on when it might first be available.

I don't see any 320 resolution scopes being game changers. A better working Q14 than Armasight put out previously would be really nice.

I agree. The previous Q14 wasn't really friendly to use and had a lot of quirks. If the new one works well and produces a good image, the 640 unit might be worth having. The size will be really cool if nothing else. I doubt it'll be worth much as a weapon sight but for a spotter I bet it's decent.

Every time I point my thermal towards the sky, I have the same issue as OP. Everything washes out. It's not the leaves. It has something to do with the orientation of the scope, or the earth, or the sun, or dang freak i don't know.

What pulsar thermal do you have? I am looking to get a thermal to scan the wheat fields and had looked at the Leupold, but after the review here, I am not going with it as the wheat fields are a half mile long. I would love to find a good thermal monocular or even night vision monocular that would reach out to around 600 yards. I don't expect to be able to identify what is out there at 600 yards, just that something is out there and I can get closer to identify the object from around 250 yards. Any suggestions on a thermal or night vision monocular to accomplish this?

We used a FLIR Scout TK this past weekend, it works well out to 200 yards but it's difficult to ID what you're looking at past 150yds. Anything under that was no problem, particularly when using the black hot color palette.

i demoed the new leopould handheld thermal, unreal, so cheap, loved it, ordered one, waiting patiently

If I don't win this contest I'm legit going to start selling my plasma here in San Antonio. As a current student, I don't have income but I'm going crazy over thermals and think I found a solution

Where is that contest? If you don't mind another contestant

It will bring me good karma

http://www.flir.com/ots/display/?id=8284...ts_programmatic

Sweet, in on that.