Quote History Quoted:
1. Wow I would kill for a f/0.95 lens with a 51 degree field of view.
2. Also by going from f/1.2 to f/1 lenses, we would gain 50% more light and the tubes will be able to use the light. However the depth of field would get shallower.
3. Now if anyone acutally made f/1 lenses for the PVS-14.
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Quote History Quoted:
1. Wow I would kill for a f/0.95 lens with a 51 degree field of view.
2. Also by going from f/1.2 to f/1 lenses, we would gain 50% more light and the tubes will be able to use the light. However the depth of field would get shallower.
3. Now if anyone acutally made f/1 lenses for the PVS-14.
1. Me too! If it was with reasonable distortion I think I would be willing to pay a pretty significant sum for these. I am still interested in the ones from FLIR, but two user reports weren't that positive - or at all positive. Will need to wait for additional input with guys spending more time outdoors and not in an expo setting. And also the BNVD 51 body itself would need to be better than DTNVG I am using currently as I am very much out of luck gettings the PVS-14 compatible 51deg optics here in the EU. Their own for the BNVD 51 are non-ITAR though but I heard not so positive view on the body overall. Maybe a bit biased view I'd guess, but anyway, tells something.
Btw you are free to contact Thales - no ITAR or related restriction that I am aware of. Though getting them to sell one unit to a regular citizen is likely to be harder than pulling teeth out without anesthetic.
2. That's what I'm a bit obsessed with too. Can't have that much performance gain easily with a tube upgrade. Though that depth of field reduction would be bad given how shallow it is already with ~1.2.
3. I think F/1.05 (or even a bit faster) are out there somewhere. I could not find a decent straight on-axis pic of said objective lens, but I think I found one or two pics (that I didn't save of course) where I "measured" it around 1.00 to 1.05. Also I remember Cj7Hawk stating such do exist.
Quoted:
So where would the new 51 degree lens from FLIR fall?
From the first impressions from TNVC/Vic and another guy said they have some distortion and overall not happy with the quality.
They have a worse F-ratio than all regular 14 objective lenses and who knows what the T-value is - it could be okay or could be bad, or really bad. If the T-value is close to the F-ratio then it may be okay on that front because a MUM-14 is not bad at all while having quite substantially less light gathering ability than most 14 objective lenses. Will need to wait for reviews. Their own BNVD and MNVD 51 (based on N-14 body I think) is out already I think but don't quote me on that. Coming to EU later this year, but as far as I understood they were ready already when first shown and price was listed on the webshop too.
There is the issue with any regular wide FOV optics which is that you lose resolution as a large FOV is concentrated on the same 18mm photocathode as a 40deg FOV view would be. That plus smaller glass has the same effect. They do weigh less because of less glass in there so that's definitely a plus. The ones from Kent Optronics that are used by N-Vision Optics for their WFOV PVS-15 have that foveal thing going that tries to mimic human eye resolution, but I remember it was @Augee that said it looked horrible. Also their patent states the F-ratio to be 2.34 if I remember it right so you'd need a super tube to get performance out of them in very dark environments.
Hoping one of you guys over there would hop in and try one out. Assuming they are available already. I am pretty sure their own optic housing & the 14 compatible one use the exact same glass so review from either would tell about the other too.
Additionally there is a PVS-31 style WFOV binocular coming from L-3 sometime in the future: