Any word on this? Features? Price?

Curious to know more details about this too. Haven't heard about it myself.

Naturally, I hear about something new shortly after buying one of their existing products (Zoom ZH50)

I have the unit in my possession right now (there is only 1 of them in the US right now) but unfortunately can't say any more than what they've allowed to be leaked on social media. I can confirm it's amazing, the image quality is unlike anything you've ever seen. It will be the most expensive hunting thermal ever to hit the market but it's also going to have 0 competition.

It's a 2x base mag and the ID range is further than what you can even begin to imagine.

It's hard to believe it's actually real. I thought it would be several more years before we saw this technology in a thermal hunting scope but it's real and it's coming soon.

We'll have a full review with all the details including pricing etc on The Late Night Vision Show on YouTube next Thursday. That's the date for it to all go public.


Jason

Jason,

Y’all gotta do images with that podcast - PLEASE

Exactly. I enjoy his podcast but not neatly enough video with the products.

What do you think about the ZH50? Inquiring minds want to know.

That thing has got to be YUUUUGE money. $18k ?

Yes sir, we have plenty of videos to show during the podcast and it's worth noting we went from drought conditions to literally getting over 10" of rain while we've had the unit for field testing. So if you want to see what it looks like in hot and humid East Texas conditions you'll see it.lol I honestly can't wait to see how good it really is on a cold dry winter night. It's going to be out of this world.

Without sounding like a mattress salesman and without being "over the top", this really is a scope that brings something to the market that we've never seen the likes of. It is truly, without any possible reasonable argument, the best thermal image ever produced by a hunting thermal scope for US civilians. While the price will be out of reach for the vast majority of hunters, it is the first step to seeing this type of resolution become more common and more affordable in years to come.

No. 11 Guiyang Street, YEDA, Yantai, China

Have no love for China, NONE. Much rather send them a welcome card to a place called Hell.

No one, "Literally" NO ONE, Cares about your politics.

Bring forth the Xray vision scope.

I am ready to watch the cool kids play with this and see cheap BAEs fall from the sky as every influencer dumps theirs to get after the Iray

I personally could care less what anyone thinks about my politics. Don't run for office or have anything for sale.

All those "cool kids" are going to have tears in their eyes when the shotgun wedding between China and USA ends in divorce. Some call this just a part of the upcoming "new world order".

On a side note remember Flir? Just a few years ago they dumped everyone of us.

I do agree with your thoughts about BAE though. Do you think BAE, N-Vision and Trijicon are one big happy family? Kinda like InfiRay USA, Ultimate Night Vision and Innovative Buisness Services are. Heck don't believe me look them up for yourself. They all happily reside at " 800 Railhead Rd Suite 316, Fort Worth, TX 76106". Fly there with Google Earth. Interesting looking place huh. Only business name on the door appears to be Innovative Buisness Services.

https://irayusa.com/about
https://ibstx.com/
https://ultimatenightvision.com/

Where does "InfiRay USA" manufacture their units. Hopefully not in this warehouse.

What in the world are you trying to prove? This is ridiculous. There is no secret or conspiracy there.... Innovative Business Services is a 3rd party shipping and warehouse service (We use them to warehouse and ship our products too, as do tons of other small Texas businesses) and IBS is owned by a Retired US Marine Lieutenant Colonel, so I'd be a little cautious trying to smear and run down his business name online.

Ultimate Night Vision is one of the oldest and most respected thermal and NV businesses in this entire industry. The owner of UNV started iRay USA and is the US distributor for Infiray. There's no secret to any of this but in my nearly 10 years of being in this business have I ever seen someone so concerned with the address of the warehouse of any thermal dealer or distributor? Look up Pulsar, Sightmark, Firefield, Kopfjager and Bullet Safe. They all have the exact same address in Mansfield, TX....no secret or conspiracy there and none of those products are made in that warehouse and very few if any were made in the US. Again, it's never been news, a concern or a big surprise to anyone....

Yeah, IBS has been around much longer than UNV or iRay or iRayUSA, by more than a decade, if not 2, LOL. Maybe IBS is the overlord parent company and since you (Outdoor Legacy) are listed on their "client" list, you are probably part of the conspiracy as well.

Dang it you outed me as the head poobah of the entire Chinese conspiracy! I'll just have to pick up the red phone now and speak with President Xi and let him know the plot has been foiled!

Hey I don't like that China has such a strong hold on manufacturing and technology more than any other red blooded American but at the end of the day we all sit on our iPhones, Androids and computers made in China while we have this discussion.

The one thing that is good for the WHOLE thermal industry is that this 1280 is coming in a thermal scope and it's opening the door for future development, hopefully by US companies. DNS, you might know more about about this than me but I was told BAE has a 1280 sensor (and might even have it in some sort of optic?) but that it's $30,000-$40,000? Any word on that? Getting a 1280 on the consumer hunting market is step 1 and someone had to do it. I'm hoping the next few years bring some competition and eventually push the prices down.

We should go pull up the poll from earlier this year on 1280 predictions. I know it was heavily weighted to 3-5 years out because I went and bought a Halo X

The introduction is cool and all, and I hope they sell a million of them, but IF I was wearing my Nostradamus hat Id guess that this release wouldn't change the purchases of more than half a dozen individual buyers over all thermal sales in the last year.

I'm speculating that these new wiz bangs will go for at least double+ HaloX $$ and at 2x base mag barely a handful of content creators will make the leap. I wish I was wrong but I doubt it. There will be the typical internet flex fellas who buy them just to be the first to post on FacePlace but If there are more purchased units than demo units circling the US for the next couple years I will honestly be pleasantly surprised.

This is no doubt going to be the first real kick in the pants for image resolution that the commercial off the shelf market has seen in quite a while but it isn't likely to effect the average purchaser for several years.

640 resolution units were steadily priced for a decade. Pulsar and IrayUSA took some chops at it but 640 resolution was still consistently priced until the fairly recent efforts by AGM and Burris to enter the market. Burris seems to have completely flopped but AGM looks to be killing it. {PSA, plug your ears for the imminent political screeching "Red Menace" rants this statement may stoke up}

Excuse all the speculation. I just needed a mental break from selling plasma and collecting cans out of the bar ditch so I could go buy my TL50C.

I cannot help but agree. This sounds like a big deal regarding the future but I think the price will make adoption slow. Still, I guess I'd better get going early this morning since it seems I have competition in the can collecting department now…

I’m lost on all these “content creators” and social media stuff. Is that really what pushes these things? I do t have social media besides this and LinkedIn for work, and I don’t take videos of my stuff normally. That said, I do care about how good image quality could be…add in some PiP, ranging, and decent battery life and I’d have my perfect thermal

I think your speculation is very accurate. The price of the new iRay 1280 is going to make a lot of people's eye's roll back in their heads and they'll choke on their tongue. I also don't think iRay USA is going to be shocked by this. That company is run by one of the pillars of the NV and thermal industry who's been doing this longer than most of us even knew thermal and NV hunting optics existed.

The average Ferrari buyer isn't worrying about how he's going to make the notes. That doesn't mean the Mercedes and Porsche buyers are poor, it's just a different class of wealth, buying power or maybe willingness to spend the money. Either way, I don't think we'll see people dumping their XRF's to upgrade, nor will N-Vision lose any sales. What I believe we will see is a buyer who has the money sitting there and he doesn't really care if it's $10,000 or $30,000, if he wants it he'll buy it. And we as an industry of thermal hunting enthusiasts NEED those buyers. They are paving the way for the rest of us and hopefully one day, years from now, we'll be buying high end 1280 scopes for $6,000-$10,000. Anyone remember $5,000 flat screen TV's? Now they are $300. A lot of folks had to buy them at $5,000.....$4,000....$3,000....and all the way down but now the technology has gotten cheaper and cheaper and initially financed by those early adopters. I'm hoping long term we see the same with 1280.

I’m sort of a big deal don’t you know …..



You’d be surprised how much the social media thing spins the big wheel of industry, they could have a room full of hog/varmint hunters who use these tools regularly for crop preservation, agri protection, and eradication but the “marketing” departments step right by them to talk to the guy with his photo crew and content creation company who will use the scope at a high fence ranch and drum out 3 min videos with 60 secs of ad content.

I sorta shake my head at it when I attend the big shows and just watch all the influencers walk about and say how great things are that they have little real world use behind

BUT

That’s the internet and I’m going back to my hole in the interwebs and hoping my 787 subscribers follow me

To quote Outdoor Legacy
And we as an industry of thermal hunting enthusiasts NEED those buyers. They are paving the way for the rest of us and hopefully one day, years from now, we'll be buying high end 1280 scopes for $6,000-$10,000.

That is Gospel Fact.

I'm hustling to buy my optic a couple months ahead of schedule now simply because the attention this product release is sure to bring IrayUSA.
I expect (and I'b bet the big brains at IrayUSA do too) that for each one of the Über scopes they sell IrayUSA will sell an extra 100 of their other products simply from the brand exposure and social media hype.
If they ever get their audio game on point after these uber optic views start clicking up the industry is going to roll over.

TLew,
Forum posts and SM videos have sold more product in the past 20 years than all the print and tv ad spots combined. No doubt guys like you exist Sir, and it is admirable, but I imagine there are probably more unicorns running around.

I am happy it is finally here, but this has been coming for a while and actually is about when I would have expected. This is from 2019. iRay really wasn't any sort of market presence then and honestly, I was expecting that ULIS would have the new 1280 cores as they had been testing them and higher resolution cores for some time...

https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/thermal-scope-price-trends.847318/#post-11045578

I made my first thermal kill in 2014 with an Armasight Zeus 3x 640 75mm. This was just after there was a HUGE price drop in the market due to FLIR reducing the price of their sensors to vendors such as Armasight. What had been a $12K scope got reduced to $7K. Just a few weeks earlier, I had purchased and returned (due to manufacturer defect) an ATN THOR 320 (or 384?) resolution that cost me $6800 and now I was getting a 640 scope for for less than $400 more.

It seems like the prices have been coming down ever since then, but more of a trickle. Manufacturers have kept prices inflated by adding features, but not improving resolution, though they have made some changes in image clarity with reduced pixel distances. I hope the new cores drive down prices of 'inferior' resolution products a good bit.


That is about all I have heard as well. Like I said, I was expecting ULIS (as FLIR was floundering with their Boson 640s) and while there were rumors from BAE, it never seemed to go beyond that. Then iRay happened...

If BAE does come out with a 1280 core, it is going to need to be competitive or amazingly better than iRay. BAE used to have the best cores and now the imagery is being matched by much less expensive units made by a company eating up greater shares of the market at quick rate.

Jason,

Rumor circulating that the price is going to be $ 17 k

Also if this is 10 micron, is there any additional limitation on recoil handling?

Obviously there isn’t much precedent on recoil handling for a 1280 res core - does the manufacture have anything to offer on specs and/or have you tested the unit on 308 and higher ?

Thanks

I've seen rumors circulating from $5,000 to $30,000, so far none of them I've seen have hit the nail right on the head but there have been some that are close. Currently dealers (at least the vast majority) don't even know the exact price because it's been a moving target and was just nailed down. I've had several other dealers I'm friends with contact me in the last 3-5 days and mention a price that was incorrect and their info was wrong. I'll say the guess you posted doesn't win the cigar.

Recoil rating is going to be .300 Win Mag or 7mm Mag. There are some considerations for the recoil on the 1280 sensor that are different than your standard optic but I'm honestly tip toeing on the line with everything I've said in this post so far.lol Without risking stepping over the line I better wait until Thursday to answer all the questions.

If someone will send me a reminder Thursday AM I'll be glad to come back here and answer every question I can. Our review should go live Thursday AM as well and we'll have all the answers there but the review will be long and I understand not everyone will be able to take nearly an hour off Thursday morning to watch it.

Jason

I suspect that's a bit low. I would say $27K minimum. I am a bit curious what N-Vision would have to charge, since they have every resource BAE has to offer available to them.
Using BAE's Athena 1920 X 1280 core, not nearly as plug and play as the BAE TWV640 core, is surely doable. Six years ago BAE was going to charge me $5K for their TWV640 core.
Emagin 's cost for their display was $1.4K so it just was not reasonable to roll my own. Flir's Boson 640 would have cost around $2.5 K roughly twice that of the 320 version but we
all know how that played out.

Sierra-Olympic is achieving a 49 X 32 degree field of view using the Athena core with a 25mm lens. This would be equivalent to each pixel representing a .86" square patch at 100 yards.
Currently the TWV640 core with a 35mm lens offers a 12.5 X 9 degree field of view. This is equivalent to each pixel representing a 1.2" square patch at 100 yards.

One would have to ask themselves is it worth having a rifle scope that offers roughly 5.5 times the field of view for a roughly 4.3 higher cost or probably more. In the hunting domain there will be some that will just have to have it because it exists but I suspect it will be very few in number.