These have been quite the stir lately in the thermal world, and having had used the IRay MH25 bridged with a L3 WP PVS14 in the past I was pretty excited when I caught the word that the IRay scopes would soon be available in the states. Looked into what the Alpha had to offer over the standard MK1 and didn't need the extra bling that it offered so I got my order in with Jason at Outdoor Legacy. I'll start off by saying this...I'm no professional, don't have a big Instagram or social media presence other than 6-7 hunting/shooting related forums, nor do I have a TV show to promote, BUT I do hunt and shoot alot. Shooting competitions, hunting and guiding in several countries and most of our westerns states and here at home in Texas, I feel like I gotta pretty good handle on how things should and shouldn't work. All my gear gets used hard and I expect it to perform up to its "value". I have had a chance to hunt behind and use quite a bit of thermal and NV equipment (both dedicated and clip-on), and have owned a couple higher end units. Take my opinions for what they are worth...

So the scope shows up and I get her unboxed. When I pick the scope up out of the box the first thing I notice is how robust and great it feels. Ya know...like picking up Nightforce NX8/NXS, Vortex Gen2,Z Co etc...solid construction so we are off to a good start. I usually hunt with a combo of NV NODs for getting around/stalking and initial spotting and then follow up with thermal for extending scanning and shooting, so I want a scope that can be used as a scanner and then be remounted before we stalk in for shooting. The RICO's size and form factor fit the hand very good so another plus.

Pull the factory mount out next. We were warned, but whoever designed the mount needs to be taken out back and beaten. Jason had told me to pay attention to the direction of bolt travel on couple of them as they were left handed threads. I'm aware that ADM makes a quick release mount and I'll be the first to say I am a fan of their products and have quite a bit of their stuff, but $250 for the RICO mount is ridiculous for what it is. I plan on using the RICO on both bolt and ARs, so I was going to find a way to make the factory mount or a BoBro mount work to accommodate both. First thing I want to do is check the mount fit on a 1913 rail so I reach for an extra rail I had off a Bighorn action....yikes...tons of slop between the lug interfaces. The lug mortise of a 1913 rail measures .210 and a typical, upper end set of scope ring's lug will measure .200. Turn the mount over to measure the lug to find it measures at .188. Not a big deal to most guys probably, but sure not a confidence booster to me on the repeatability that I will be looking for. It's good practice IMO to be sure to mount any ring into the lug mortise making sure the rear of the lug is making contact, so I put that in my Rolodex of something to watch on the factory mount.


Charger, battery,etc come out next. All good except the supplied cord...its a double ended pig tail on one end with a USB and a male video plug. What??? First thoughts are something else to get in the way or hang up on if I'm running the cable to charge the scope in the truck while out hunting. I'll just cut it off later and tape the end over...


So we get the scope mounted to the factory mount and we start finding out where we need to be on the rails of the guns I intend to use. Looks like schit, but I still want the flexibility of being able to move it from gun to gun. I run VLTOR A5 extended tubes on every AR15 I own so I know some will question the eye relief and scope placement, but that's where I found my warm and fuzzy. Still plenty clearance for the ambi charging handles to clear the rear of the mount so all's good. Get the scope turned on and the very first thing I notice is the size of the screen. Wow..impressed, I like it and Jason and Hans were spot on. Start scrolling through the menus and I'm digging it. Button lay out is very good and the menu is very intuitive. No worries here, MUCH better than some..ahum Super Hogster...



It's daylight, but I get set up to zero out of my reloading room on a steel 66% IPSC at 100 yards I already had set up. Getting focused and eye relief tuned I notice the ocular focus ring is VERY loose and easily moved. Meh...ok, not a fan of that but again just personal preference. Objective focus is much more stout which is good, but I notice the focus 'window' is very, very narrow. I move off the 100 yard IPSC to another 6" steel plate at 200. Focus needed quite a bit of adjusting to get back in track and again a very, very narrow window of optimal focus. Zeroing went on with out a hitch and the RICO's zeroing process if much like any other with a freeze option. Cool..lets move it over to the AIAT, see what's up and get it zeroed. This was about the time I had had enough of the hated rubber eyecup which I had planned on removing anyhow so off she came. Whoa... the lens is right there at the very end of the eye piece with ZERO protection without it. Not a fan of this either as I KNOW what the scope is going to be exposed to. Hunted around and found a extra Butler Creek scope cap that fit perfect and wrapped it in place with some high zoot 3M electrical tape so it couldn't slide off. Zeroing again went without a hitch...Looking ok...



Take off and remount on the 6ARC AR and going to confirm zero so we can go knock down some hogs that night. Had to slightly adjust the zero. Nothing major, within a couple inches both in elevation and windage, but none the less a zero shift...
Still excited to get it out that night and get to the point everybody is raving over...the image quality. Get inside the ranch and running on NODs to an oilfield location that looks over 400 acres of open pasture, crawl in the bed of the truck over, run the legs down on the tripod and get rifle locked in to scan around. Find a few groups of deer scattered around with the closest being 250 yards or so and get them in focus and the image quality is pretty good! Get the brightness and contrast settings kinda tuned in for White Hot and scroll to the HighLight palette. Damn, that's a pretty cool palette. Scroll to Black Hot and about puked. Don't remember if it was Jason or Hans that mentioned it on their review as lacking, but it's damn near unusable IMO. So go back to White Hot and pivot off that group of deer to find some others and I notice the scope noticeably brightness up. HUH? Pivot back to first group of deer and the scope dims back down to my original settings. Hummm.....I know that's how the High Light mode is supposed to work in this scope, but have never seen another thermal scope toggle the brightness up and down like that on White Hot. Scan the rest of the pasture and don't see any hogs out and about so I get everything back in the truck and relocate. Pull up to a gate between pastures that is located on a hill which offers a spot you can see a LONG ways. Hell lets try out the detection range on this thing. Turned the scope on and picked up cattle with 2-3 week old babies easily at 2580 yards (measured on Goggle Earth). Impressive! Get to another spot on the ranch and stop in the road where again I can see about 350 acres of broken pasture with cattle in it. Set up, find a small group of cattle about 100 yards from the truck and about get my retina burned out when I scan off them. WTF is this thing doing? I get back on the cattle and adjust the settings again on White Hot to where I like them. Scan off them left and right and the brightness adjusting is annoying as hell...video below. I played here for 15-20 minutes with all the palettes, totally skipping Black Hot. Man, I am not impressed at this point...
https://youtu.be/JBX-oT1vY40

Take the scope off the rifle and going to drive some roads while glassing. Find a little group of hogs a little later in a spot where I could put a stalk on them so I remount the scope, throw the NODs on and head their way. Didn't get any video, but knocked 2 down out of the group at about 110-115 yards so I guess zero maintained. Got us a bright spot...called it a night.



MORE TO COME.....

Good post !

Does it not record the menu or screen icons ? ... makes it a lot easier to review settings later ...

Josh, after seeing the video you posted above...

Sum Ting Wong!

Either a setting, or a bad sensor, or a software issue.

The cattle look clear enough once that cloud of white goes away. But shouldn't it be operating with that clarity constantly?

No sir, none of the menu icons show up while recording. There is 5 brightness and 5 contrast settings so it’s pretty straight forward.



You would think so Barry. We’ll catch up and you’ll have to run through it.

I'm just not seeing other videos filmed with the MK1 640 or the Alpha (which I gather are the same system) be that bad. Detail of surroundings in other videos remain crisp, and you don't see the jump between crisp picture and blurry picture when the scope is moved to and fro.

Hey Josh, I called you again, holler back when you get a minute.

The video looks bad, no question about it. It looks like you're in Highlight mode and UltraClear is turned on. Those two settings combined with certain weather conditions can make the bright/dark flickering thing happen pretty bad. If you put a Pulsar in Trees mode with Image Boost on in those same conditions it will do the same thing. I get calls, emails and videos about that as well. On those nights try White Hot and turn UltraClear off and give me a call. This is probably a bad week for testing since most of Texas is wet and nasty but I'd still get out there and see how it performs. Your scope also looked like it needed to be NUC'd, I'm assuming it was on semi-auto and not auto? If it's on auto, something is wrong.

We'll get it sorted out with whatever works best for you, replacement, refund etc.

Jason

$6000 scope? The iray folks need to go back to the drawing board.

... well - it is a bit steep for a straight up imported China-thermal

The Iray USA folks DID go back to the drawing board and used the guts and lens from the China-thermal and upgraded the body and connectors - that scope is going to run $ 7k

If your comment is 6k for the video shared by Josh - I get ya BUT video recording are a notoriously bad means of judging a scopes performance and capabilities.

Usually you can snap raw images using thermals and they are high res still photos of what the unit more likely represents.

On another forum a user posted the below (credit to skinney on predator masters):







Now all that to say this : I’ve been watching and waiting to hear feedback from MK1 owners to determine if they are blown away by the visuals.

In the video posted above I don’t see a single frame of video that looks as good as the stills.

The auto gain is wreaking havoc on that image - regardless if clear view and rocks or xyz is active a scope that behaves that way needs a bit too much TLC for my liking . When you totally lose the surrounding scene and the scope essentially gives you a super boosted visual of the hot target that can become problematic ...

The original FLIR thermosights did that auto gain nonsense and it didn’t end up going well for them.

Hoping the OP can find some settings that make the scope perform as illustrated in the pics above - shouldn’t have to mind too many settings to have the good stuff on the regular.

Well I had about a hours long worth of key pecking going on my phone for my next installment this AM, and was away too long so it vaporized. I’ll just cut to the chase....Wednesday night I had it out for another few hours and the highlight of the night was being able to ID deer at 930 yards. Everything else was pretty much the same/same with about a 10 second rainbow flea race in the screen one time when I turned it on. (This had happened once before and I wasn’t able to catch it on record. After talking to Jason this AM, this may be a battery issue?)

https://youtu.be/iIu-hySg_Sw

Called the next morning (Wed) and explained to Casey at IRay what was happening. He admitted himself (admirable) that he probably didn’t have enough knowledge of the scope to answer my questions, but he would get with someone who did and call me back within the hour. Long story short there I had to call 2 days later and leave a message to get a return call, this being 8 AM. Emailed the video, explained to him my position, was pretty frank about what I thought of it and asked him to let me know something by the end of the day. I also made it very, very clear to him to pass on that the brightness adjusting is happening in BOTH White Hot and High Light under every contrast/ brightness combo. You can see in the video I am changing pallets and having to refocus constantly to keep image in acceptable detail. At 4:30 still no return call so I called again. Casey stated the CEO (I assume Tyler) has seen the video and he says everything seems to be working like it should and he sees no issues with the image quality. Hummm... alright...I tell Casey I’ll pull it off the gun, set it aside and just keep running my NV setup till we can figure out something Monday. At this point I don’t want to put anymore use on the scope if it’s proven to be working like it should and I’m in a position of trying to sell it. I’ll just sit a contest out this weekend...

Didn’t use the scope any Friday or Sat night as we had family stuff going on. Sunday mid day or so I get to fooling with it and notice the battery shows to be half full and I threw it on the charger till full. Install the battery later and go to turn it on and nothing... WTF again. Take battery out, put it back in and nothing. Put it on charger and it shows full? Battery goes back in and I get it to come on and I notice it self nukes 3 times in a row. Weird...Look in and the battery is in the yellow and bouncing to green, back to yellow.. back to green. Take the battery BACK out and leave it off for about 30 minutes. Put the battery back in again, turn it on and get another rainbow flea race...

I’ve been being patient passing any judgement to this point, honestly. Walk out to the back yard and going to do some scanning around. So go back through the same routine and video is below. These heifers are 75-80 yards from where I’m standing, the brush line in the background is 175ish. This is 8:30 at night, no fog, about 60% humidity (off local weather) and 70*. You’ll notice in this video that my “floater” that was right of the bottom of the vertical stadia in the first video is gone, BUT the cross hairs have a tiny bit of white outline.

https://youtu.be/z2v4rlDKk60

So, I’m response to Jason’s reply above...like I told him on the phone... the scope has been in auto nuke since I’ve had it. Whether it’s working or not it’s hard to tell. Again, I reiterated to him this morning this is happening in other pallets, NOT just the High Light. You can see in the above video I spend more time with the Black Hot palette. He asked about conditions in the first video and they were about the same as the second video, maybe a touch cooler with no fog. We talked about using the UltraClear setting in the off mode, so we’ll see. At this point that one simple change would have to offer a HUGE amount of improvement to be worthy.

Side note... Jason has been more than GTG on the handling of this deal. Trust me, I get it. Scopes, rifles, this and that are VERY subjective things, but I still demand a piece of equipment to perform up to its value as stated above.

No need to sit out that tournament.

I'll bring you 2nd Super Hogster. Throw it on that ARC, sight it in and go!

Very good points and I totally agree about having to incorporate too much TLC into a scope and it’s settings for it to remain usable. The very narrow focus window is a turn off for sure. I would say it’s just as tight as focusing PVS14s.

I saw those pictures when O’Neil put them out and was way impressed! If the picture quality through mine was a 1/3 as good as those pictures in the conditions they were taken, I’d probably be happy.

Lol... no sir, I was referring to one this past weekend! We are a full go this weekend and something will be atop of that 6 ARC one way or another. Grin....

I see your concern with the way the scope is acting. I get a little bit of the "bright-dim" cycle that you are seeing with my FLIR536 when moving onto an animal and then off of it- usually more noticeable early in the evening when the surrounding trees/etc haven't cooled down all the way.
I had issues with my FLIR just shutting off and also doing a black and white version of the "rainbow flea dance". After sending it back and waiting patiently they replaced the core and it seems to be working better now.
I love thermal hunting- more so than any other type. But I've about come to the conclusion that the odds of manufacturers disappearing is pretty high. And the race to add more on-board features seems to work somewhat but complicates things immensely.
I guess I'll just save up for a Trijicon or REAP-IR and hope for the best. It's about like buying a high-end Mac. It's great when it works but it's obsolete and UN-upgradeable/repairable after what seems like a relatively short time based on what they cost.

Tried some different settings as Jason and I talked about yesterday. Image quality was slightly better in places with UltraClear off or on, worse in others. The autogain on the brightness level is still annoying in the 3 pallets I’d ever use. May be personal preference, but I’d rather maintain OVERALL picture quality, as in target and what’s behind/right/left of it rather than degrade all of that and put emphasis on TARGET quality. Think about that a minute and consider when and where you/we thermal hunt...

The significant brightness gain and loss is a no go for me and from looking at other RICO videos I’m still not seeing it show up as drastically or at all. That and the overall picture quality gives me a purty good idea of what’s going on, but I digress.

I’ll be sending it back.

Sorry it didn’t work out - appreciate you sharing .

I’ve decided to pursue other models as well...

Ahhh...no worries here Pig Popper. It is what it is!

Headed back to a Halo LR myself.