Edited. Don't really believe he will stop but what the hell I'll try.....

I guess I'm just curious as to why you would believe an official statement any more at that point, then.

Anyways...

Let me apologize first to everyone who just comes here to get some information and knowledge on night vision and associated technologies and has to get sucked into the totally unnecessary "he said, she saids" and the extremely high noise to signal ratio in the night vision market in general.

The NV industry is actually pretty small, and in the past, it's attracted a lot of unsavory characters who saw low customer education and high returns, especially in the earlier days. There are a lot of buried bodies and a lot of skeletons in closets, some of which are beginning to come to light now. This is why it's always been one of TNVC's core missions to educate and inform first before making sales, and why each of our technical staff comes from the end-user community first, not from a sales or marketing background. This can also sometimes bring with it some abrasiveness in certain situations, but that's neither here nor there. The thing is, there are not that many actual "independent" vendors out there. Obviously everyone's tubes ultimately come from the same couple of places, but there are really only a few companies that deal direct with the manufacturers, the rest are downstream dealers, and some of these larger distributors have been known to cut off smaller dealers who "dare" to go outside of their little fiefdom and/or don't toe the company line of their "Night Vision Daddy."

Now, regarding the topic at hand, we've been hearing this claim get passed around for a while now--and with renewed vigor in the last few months, attributed to sources other than USNV as well, though they've been smart not to commit it to writing that I've seen.

It was so common at SHOT that it became a "guessing game." Someone would come to the booth wanting to know about unfilmed tube technology and degradation, and I'd ask "let me guess, you were told [spurious claim not worth repeating], and you heard it from [dealer/dealer description]." It is what it is. As I've said before, whether we're talking about used market goods or dealers--there's a lot of good guys out there in the market and the industry, but there's also a lot of people out there willing to exploit others through a variety of means for their own benefit.

::shrug::

Once again, the claim is bunk, and seems to originate from a desire to move non-L3 tubes, but the claim is not to my knowledge originating from Elbit Systems (Harris, ITT, etc.). Needless to say, they've certainly never used it as a sales pitch on us, and we do a lot of volume on high end tubes, and have never experienced it in our many years of working with modern unfilmed tubes, nor heard of it from any of our customers or contacts ranging from folks placed in USSOCOM, AWG, and even foreign MODs, and all users of unfilmed tube technology, despite the many other skeletons we've heard about, some of which we're not at liberty to discuss.

We deal in both L3Harris and Elbit tubes, but in the end, our commitment is to the end-user, both professional and recreational, and providing the best education and most accurate information possible, as well as the best customer support we can, and hoping that that's enough for some customers to send business our way when they're ready to open up the wallet, but full well knowing that it won't always be, and that not everyone is going to end up buying from us.

~Augee

Fair enough.



~Augee

That's the best you're going to get Matthew, I doubt very much L3Harris wants to give away everything. If you want to stick with MA photocathodes which have Electron affinity then by all means step back into the dark ages, literally.

That said I am going to take a tour of the Production facility in a few months and I might have some tidbits of info to sprinkle out there.

Here is some facts to close this anti L3 sales thread.

Fact, I said to everyone when this thread came NSFJojo would be in here.

Fact, the vendor in question does not offer L3 tubes any longer, they've been cut off for monies owed

Fact, another dealer (we won't mention names) continues to tell every customer not to purchase L3 tubes for this reason that they fail early and easily. Several of us at Shot Show fielded question after question of false claims. This does not include the repeated phone calls from our customer base stated the same dealer claims.

Fact, we train here for a living and have what I call some of the best NV trainers in the world from the special operations community  whom have more time under NODS than 95% of us along with more than 500hrs under L3 unfilmed tubes.

Fact, each one of my trainers, (including other staff) have more than 500hrs on their L3 unfilmed and not a single set of dozens of tubes including rental sets have ever shown any type of degradation claimed from this company along with a certain dealer.

Fact, (and in closing) these claims are and continue to this day (I personally fielded a call yesterday for a13K L3 unfilmed goggle order) and the customer also contacted the said dealer who stated he needed to go with a Harris/Elbit system as he and his friend would be seeing "substantial performance issues with the L3 unfilmed tubes as they use them".

Fact, these false claims are for ONE reason, and one reason only, and that is to sell Elbit tubes to the majority as  these said companies portfolio's make up 90 to 100% of these tubes.

I have instructed my staff not to comment any further in this motive driven thread that has started for the motives I laid out. We said our peace and our customers love their best of the best L3 unfilmed tubes and so does our men and women in uniform whom have never experienced a 20% tube degradation after 500 hours. And yes we sell Elbit tubes and lots of them as well. They are good tubes as well but do not perform like L3 unfilmed tubes, which are the best of the best.

Edit, to add one point. Yes we are a direct distributor for both L3 and Elbit, we do not deal with a middle man for tubes and build everything in-house for some who may not know this.

-out-

Not so veiled insinuations aside, my first post in this thread said clearly that I disagreed with the "20% in 500 hours" non sense.

As to what  USNV said- I can't tell you WTF they are telling people, I don't buy NV from them.

We sell Harris/Elbit, L3 and Photonis tubes in units.

Harris/Elbit WP HP+ tube in a BNVD Single gain. SN 32



L3 filmless in an Ultralight BNVD Single gain SN 35

Same night, middle of the woods, 20 or so miles from nearest city. Nearest street light/telephone pole close to a 1/2 mile away. Time- about a minute apart, just long enough to transfer the cheap little Iphone adapter from one unit to the next.

We just audited some data sheets for White and Green phosphor. I'm trying to catch up with this big stack of them by my desk. I post them on my EE listing for the PVS14. That always helps  give a little idea of current specs of actual units that are shipping.

It shows as slightly different between the HP green and white. I'll see if I can get an official statement on that. The WP HP+ I've seen I would say have damn near same spot spec. I'll try to get some pics of a current unit and post them.