Pulsar Themal Monoculars

[MarcusG]

Hi all,

Does anyone have any experience with the Pulsar thermal monocular range? I'm primarily interested in the Helion/Helion2 640x480 17 µm sensors. They seem to be primarily aimed at hunters as a spotting scope, I would be looking at using it for more general thermography applications. It seems to only do jpg images straight out of the box which might be a bit of a disadvantage compared to the i3 setups where you can get a png, but I do like the bayonet lens mount system for different lenses and the increased frame rate (50Hz) should hopefully make it a bit easier to track moving subjects. IQ looks reasonable based on the Youtube clips around, but I haven't been able to find many examples of still images from it. Do any of those more well versed in LWIR have any thoughts on the system?



Regards,
Marcus

[Vipitis]

as their datasheets say a-Si I highly suspect it is french sensors (Pico640 variant) inside (unless Russian/China copies of it). But mind you that those arean't meant for thermography application as you don't have radiometric measurements, they are built to detect and that is it. Maybe the wirless features allow you to capture some good video, but as they don't give you any information about codec or video, I would be careful. They sometimes claim 300 minutes video with 16GB internal, and that means rather low bitrate(which can work for monochrome).

[Ultrapurple]

As Vipitis says, if it isn't sold for thermography (=measurements) then it's highly unlikely to be usable for that purpose.

You are very likely to be able to see heat leaks, damp patches or whatever with that sort of 'scope but it's not the sort of thing you could put into, fro example, a homebuyers' report. Ditto any other application where any kind of temperature measurement is required.

Generally speaking it looks like the image quality from that scope is pretty good, though I was puzzled why the sample video never went below 2.5x magnification. (Maybe that's the basic optical system characteristic and has nothing to do with electronic zoom). It was also instructive to see how much processing was going on to achieve usable quality at the highest levels of magnification. Assuming the x2.5 factor is indeed down to the optics then 'x50' is a x20 digital zoom, meaning the effective sensor resolution is just 32x24 pixels!

[bap2703]

Last autumn I ordered an Axion XM30S, a 320x240, I guess a-Si 12µm from Ulis.
After 6 month of waiting for availability I cancelled my order... So at some point in time I was very well informed 
For wildlife observation it seemed very well adapted... well it's made just for that.

[MarcusG]

Thanks for the replies all, looks like I'm probably better off with an i3 core of some description!