Thermal colors

I rented a Pulsar APEX XD50A for a weekend a while back and have the thermal bug now, and I have a question for all y'all that have and use thermals more often.

Are the other color palletes besides white-hot and black-hot useful?
Do you really need the rainbow 'Predator' vision, or is that just a cool looking thing that's more useful for say air vent leak detection?

And in case this becomes a suggestion for other options my application would be hog/yote/raccoon elimination within 150/200 yards.
Area is central TX scrub, so tallish grass, stands of trees.
Platform would be a .300blk

The XD50A is my standard for comparison so if you can make comparisons to that it would be great.

Thanks in advance!

I tried several and I like the standard black hot/white hot. The colors seem to be a gimmick to me. I've owned a bunch of different ones.

At the lower price points (pulsar, eotech x320, atn, etc.) I found the pulsar to have the best picture.

I'd say some of the different color pallets can be useful. However you'd have to cycle thru them to figure out which one it is for the environmental conditions you have at that time. In 10 minutes the environmental conditions could change cause you to figure out which one is best again. I've found it best to just stick with Black/white hot. You'll get better as you gain experience with the thermals and know when the environmental conditions are causing you problems.

I also like Sepia to go with black and white. The rest I find almost useless.

Like the others my preference is black hot or white hot generally, but I have used Sepia on occasion. Here is a sample:



To me, the other colors are gimmicky. But I do like the option to change reticle colors. That can really help you to see the crosshairs. I haven't run it down, but I believe the scopes that don't offer color palettes don't have colored reticles either.

The XD50A would be a good choice for shorter shots IMO. You can do it at 150, but it isn't a great 150 yard scope and it gets harder and harder the more you go past that.

The Eotech X320 mentioned above is a monocular I believe.

The ATN doesn't compare well because they don't have a 2X model and (if recording is or becomes important to you) you have to turn the video out on each time you power up the scope and you have to manually NUC it. The Pulsar video out is always on and you have a choice of manual, semi-auto and auto NUCing. The only good comparison I see with similar features is some Armasight models. They have been popular also. Only Pulsar offers the PiP option which is very helpful in low mag scopes.

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Thank y'all for your replies so far!

dfwroadkill - The XD50A had black, white, red, and green as reticle options (even though the specs on their own site just list black and white ) And using red or green really helped with the contrast. And the PiP option is what has me heavily leaning towards the Pulsar as well since it really helps with tracking for follow up shots but still being zoomed in for placement.

I agree with the range assessment too. But even at 150 it's fairly easy to distinguish a deer or a cow from a pig

Sepia looks like it would be nice to have, but at the 3.5k price range I'd be trading colors for resolution and magnification and was weighing the added value vs those (and thus the purpose for this topic )

Personally I have tried the two colored reticle option on the 50w and just end up back on black. It provides the best contrast for me on the target. For pallette choices I'm quite content with black and white.