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holy auto referral link goatboy! 

Damn you!!!!!!  I dont need one...but now I don't know if I can resist.

You'll be happier if you resist ...

It is the Russian gen 1 of thermals, but at that price I won't worry much about using it as a loaner.  

Anyone you loan it to isn't likely to view it as you doing them a favor.

Ya I was thinking for a loaner.  Prob not a lot of use past 100 yes though

You won't find it useful past 50 yards is the problem. Leupold has dramatically oversold this unit's capabilities.

After using one a couple weeks ago I was really really disappointed. The shop was having issues with a new in the box unit booting up too. Good design, very poor execution.

Seek XR is much more capable unit for a lot less money.

wait, you're saying that someone would rather have a $8000 thermal than a $400 thermal?  Unless I missed Trijicon's sub-1k thermal optic, I don't see how this is even a relevant comparison. No one in the market for a Leupold LTO would choose it over a better, more expensive optic if they had the funds to consider those. The LTO is specifically targeted at people who want thermal but have closer to $500 to spend instead of $5000.

I tried one out. It had a much more limited range than other thermals I've owned, all of which have been Pulsar HD/XD A/S units, (also less desirable than significantly more expensive units, but once again...budgets, etc)... and I found that within - as has been stated here already - about 50 yards, it worked just fine as a thermal. Russian Gen1 NV doesn't even really work as night vision without significant secondary illumination, it's not just like a lower-resolution PVS14 with severely limited range. 

It would be a much more apt comparison to FLIR's Scout TK, since that is a product with much closer capabilities to the LTO than a multi-thousand dollar IRD 640 unit. 

Gee a 160 class core with dogshit optics? The hell you say...

I have a MX1 that can almost vote with a 160 core and good optics and its maybe good to 100 yds on people sized tgts.

Is this refering to the "fine" quality (yes thats sarcasm), of russian gen1 NV or is there actually such a thing as russian gen1 thermals (I thought they just bought/ripped off stuff from the french and others)?

Leopold quality is not represented in the LTO, even a FLIR PS-24 or SIG ECHO is better than that. It is cheap for a reason.