Looking to purchase a thermal scope. Any suggestions from anyone who has one or has had one would be greatly appreciated.

I own a few and have a couple on loan that I hunt with as well...

Before all the dealers jump on you and tell you to give them a call so they can help you (and wait, it is coming), there are plenty of good thermal scopes, but they are all different. What are YOUR specific needs? What are you hunting? How far do you typically like to hunt? What is your common short distance? What is the farthest you want to be able to hunt? In what environments do you typically hunt? What type of rifle/caliber is it going on? What budget do you have? Do you want to record?

Look in the Optics section....lots of info there. Generally you cant go wrong with Pulsar or IR Hunter/Trijicon.

I’m outside Crockett. You can some see my stuff for yourself if you’d like . No strings attached. Beats the hell out of renting$1000 worth of stuff. I use pulsar and IRD. Don’t have any armasight anymore though. Look on YouTube, but understand , none of it will be as good as what you see in real life, and some videos are made to sell you on something. Cherry picked conditions, that are perfect for advertising, but don’t exist that much in real life......

I basically need one for pig hunting. Won't be shooting anymore than 150 yards.

This!!

For thermal the limiting factor is how much you want to spend. Pick a budget and that determines which scope you can get. It doesn't make sense for anyone to recommend a $6500 scope if you wanna spend $2500.

I'll spend whatever. I'm just looking for video output and good clarity

This is strictly my opinion, but if video is really important, I think the pulsar trail is the easiest. I think armasight produced best video overall, but you’ve got to hang an external unit on the rifle to do it . Ird seems to be last in this category which is ironic, because they’ve got hands down best image through the eyepiece. They also need external recorder. I wouldn’t want all the extra wires running along the rail ect, if video was important to me. Again, my opinion. Hope this helps

Pulsar trail

The Pulsar Trail is a good suggestion for the distances involved. If you want to save money, go with the XQ50 over the XP38 and the best of the group and most expensive would be the XP50. The trail still does not have sound and video playback is at about 55 seconds for each minute of real time video (which is why I think they don't have sound, yet), but sound is promised.

If money is no object then buy the a xp50 or better. But if your like me then remember your going to pay an additional $1000 for recording without sound. You can buy a used Apex and piggyback a 1st rate DVR off it for maybe $2000 less. They don’t come up for sale very often but guilds on this forum do sale their used equipment at a discount.

Apexes are still sold new, as well. If money is no object, I would suggest a Trijicon and piggyback the mdvr. Lightweight would be with a Reap-IR and a bit more traditional with an IR Hunter MKIII 2.5-20x 35mm.

I’ve never much cared about video. But to those of you that do, do the extra wires, and packs on the rifle not bother you? Just seems like it’s one more thing to worry about getting hung on something, or going dead. Maybe you just get used to it? I travel as light as I can, but still seems like I’m packing a ton of gear when we go . And to the best of my memory I’ve never said”hey what a great time for the batteries to go dead, I was just sitting here doing nothing anyway “ So I would assume it’s the same with the recording device, but I could be wrong since I don’t use