@ARShooter91

Even a PVS14 tube has limited cycle/hour times.

Just to be clear off the bat I'm not an expert in photography or the Aurora, however... That should be adjustable in some way via software/firmware, I don't think what you're seeing is a hardware or physical limitation. In a rough explanation it comes down to how computers capture and process digital images and where in the "range" of brightness it is being asked to display those pixels. Just like how you can adjust your brightness/contrast on a computer monitor, tv, or the Aurora's viewscreen the cameras themselves can adjust how that image is originally captured and with how much light sensitivity (the lens, shutter, and sensor are all the hardware aspects that can have an effect on this as well). If I was guessing, I'd say that the original Aurora is behaving in that way due to the fact it's hardware (specifically it's sensor as the rest of the Pro appears to be the same) is struggling in that lighting situation and it's attempting to automatically compensate for that and give the user a usable image. The Pro may appear darker and it may appear that the detail is lacking when side by side, but with cameras when you increase that light sensitivity you are giving up fine details to be able to see anything at all. With a regular DSLR camera this is your ISO setting.

Here's an example of how increasing your ISO can help you see things but with the fine detail loss.

This picture was taken after sundown. With the naked eye you could see that the antelope were by the road but you couldn't see in detail or even much coloring, it was pretty dark. The ISO setting (along with other settings) on the camera was increased and produced a image that was bright enough to give us those details.

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Now, that's the WHOLE image (that needed to be resized due to arfcom photo sizes) so you can't really see the noise 1:1 but if I take the original and crop it to be the exact same resolution as the above image you can really see the noise and loss of detail.

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So as you can see from comparing the 1st image to the 2nd our brains kinda fill in the details that are missing when we have something that isn't focused on those details. So going back to the Aurora it's likely making this compensation so that we can see anything at all versus missing out on these fine details. The Aurora Pro likely has those fine details present but they're not as perceptible because they're dark and the dynamic range of the output isn't enough for us to pick them out. In its use as a camera this makes sense as you'd rather have a darker image that you can lighten in post processing vs over exposure which is pretty much impossible to fix. In its use as a helmet mounted NV division it's arguable if this is better or not, however you always have the option of adjusting the display to compensate.

I know analog isn't perfect and has limitations as well. I just have more faith in the simple analog NODs. Something goes wrong with my -14 I believe I could figure it out quite easy. My phone, camera, etc breaks and Idk where to begin. I'm a young fellow to believe it not.

In true Arfcom fashion I will have both.

You're assuming analog has reached it's zenith. I can tell you right now that the field of optics (photonic crystal formation, nanoscale thermal manipulation, etc.) is experiencing development at a breakneck pace compared to the further miniaturization of computer technologies. CMOS sensors are not a new technology, it is just that people are coming up with newer and fancier ways to arrange their CMOS to allow for digital to exist. Meanwhile, analog manipulation of light is advancing in ways you haven't thought possible; want to band-shift your thermal radiation such that it's now in the visible range? You can do that. Want to tune quantum dots to absorb in the IR band and emit in the visible? You can do that. Want to play around with metamaterials and polariton couplings and try to even guess what kind of crazy light-multiplication that work is going to produce? You can do that, right now.

There's some really impressive stuff in nanophotonic manipulation coming down the tubes, including photonic circuitry, so I would not at all be comfortable making the claim that "digital will surpass analog." In it's current state, maybe, but in the consideration of steady development in both? Not at all. Pure light manipulation will always be desirable over energy transformation.

Ok that makes more sense, especially since it's really marketed as an action/still camera and we are taking it out of it's intended element as helmet mounted NV.

The image of the OG in really dark settings is quite noisy.  I imagine that would be hell to try to post process if not impossible. Was actually one of the first downsides I noticed of the Aurora when I got mine. Still happy with it for the price considering what other digital/gen 1 NV goes for price wise.

If it's a fact, what's the supporting evidence? Show me something, anything, that digital has a chance in hell of surpassing image tubes in terms of real time low light performance. You won't be able to.

Your opinion is that a somewhat low resolution color image under high light conditions means digital is superior to Gen 3. That's a fine opinion to hold. Color can be an asset. Performance wise, a Gen 2 or Gen 3 tube surpasses the Sionyx in resolution under those conditions by a very sizable margin. That's something tangible and quantifiable in terms of being better. Want more resolution from a digital sensor? Increase the pixel count. Pixel size goes down. Sensitivity decreases as the square of pixel size.

Wishful thinking.

They didn't say what gain settings the OG was on, but did say the Pro was at zero.

Reading into that ^ they may have had the OG brightened up a bit. I run the OG and Sport at -0.7 or -0.3 usually. There's a lot of room to brighten it up, it goes up to +2.0 IIRC.

I’m more than a bit dismayed by how SiOnyx seems to be screwing around here. They take something to the shot show to peddle, open it for preorders online, boasting all sorts of performance improvements, and can’t manage to throw together *any* sort of a video for over week after?  Then when they do, This is what they put out?  Come on and give me a break. That was some sort of poorly produced “teaser” video and nothing more.

Seriously, what was that supposed to be?  And what I would consider having a ton of of ambient light in it regardless. Settings on the cameras not even apples to apples?  This reeks more of snake oil and not something that is a contender for a “game changer”.

People have been anticipating what SiOnyx “gen 2” was going to provide for over a year and SiOnyx not putting up something that shows something useful is very disappointing and amateurish. Totally strange for a company with a product line in the wild for over what? Almost two years now?

In case anyone is wondering - I own two Aurora models - one is the explorer model.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much my take on the video as well. How am i supposed to get hyped over a new product when they don't even give me a useful comparison to the current version?

I believe that this is why people in the know continue to say that digi night vision won't catch up to analog for years to decades.

It seems that analog is not only here to stay, but is also improving at a good rate.

Same.

I think the video is not an apples to apples comparison and while maybe not maliciously dishonest it is certainly less than scientific; my first gut reaction is that they are over-hyping the product and it is not that significantly better than OG.

Also, I haven't been that impressed with the company.

I got one of the first explorer kits to ship when the first version came out.

My questions to tech support were 50% unanswered, 25% answer not related to the question, 25% trade secret; can't answer non-sense. One question they refused to answer was the supplier of the included Chineseum IR light, or the POS rail mount. They refused to answer regarding a replacement because the mount didn't actually fit on a rail. They never responded to my posts or IM's when they had an industry page here on ARFCOM.

The fact that they have a new version coming out, that appears to be nothing more than a new chip in the same guts as before, is aggravating.

They are ignoring their (probably) largest base that helmet mount these things by keeping the housing the same, and not trying to accommodate such. Also, there is no mention of the videos and pics saving inverted if the camera is also inverted, such as being mounted on headgear. This would save a lot of hassle as well. It really shouldn't be that difficult to do. If they have made these tweaks or others, they are not saying. They have only mentioned the chip and the augmented reality, which coincidentally benefits those wearing the camera the most.

Doesn't surprise me at all. There is a reason that nobody has been able to do good digital night vision in the past 20 years and it is hardly for a lack of trying. Thing many of the folks in this thread don't seem to understand is that development of digital components has slowed exponentially in the past few years; we've hit the limit of Moore's Law and development cycles has become limited by the years of research and classification needed to prepare new materials for market. I say this as someone who has done research on Gallium Nitride - a truly fantastic and energy efficient materials that is just now, roughly 20 years after it's initial use in semiconductor circuitry, making its way into the market in a big way.

Sure, digital is going to continue to slowly and steadily develop over the years, but knowing the industry the way that I do, it will continue to be a slow, plodding, and brutally methodical pace. I honestly feel a little sorry for the folks at Sionyx; they took several existing technologies and put them together into a consumer product in a way that had never been done before, and was cool...but now that they've got a strong following, they're just as limited by the rules of the industry as everyone else is.

There is no magic bullet they can turn to, no groundbreaking development in digital circuitry that can solve the fundamental issue that our semiconductor science just isn't there yet. I hope I'm wrong, and that I have to eat these words when they pull out some unheard of breakthrough — but being that Sionyx is likely using off-the-shelf parts and not running a full semiconductor research laboratory, I am very doubtful they will be able to outpace the industry as a whole.

I would add that there is not enough market demand or competition to fuel leap and bounds improvement in digital NV tech.

It costs a lot of money to retool a factory for a different housing. Maybe the market for helmet mounted use is worth that, maybe it isn't. Video orientation being fixed is pretty normal in the video camera world. There are certainly exceptions though. This is probably a simple firmware fix but again, this is assuming the market using the cameras in such a way is large enough for it to be worthwhile. Augmented reality does seem beneficial to helmet mounted use, but I don't think it's limited to that. As an action camera it sounds pretty useful also.

People have to remember that this is a business and there is more to consider than just your specific desires as a consumer. Going back to not releasing good comparison videos, that makes sense! The Pro is in the pre-order stage, there likely will be changes prior to release. If your new product is going to blow away your old one you don't want to harm current sales by having everybody wait. Yes, it would be nice from our consumer point of view but people will buy a Aurora Sport now, use it, see the Pro come out and then buy that also. If they KNOW they want the Pro they'll just wait.

That's where those military contracts come into play.

FWIW, digital NV has pushed out analog NV in the hunting realm. Sure, people DO hunt with analog NV but as a percentage it's small and I'd guess most people who do own analog NV for more reasons than hunting. The biggest competitor to digital NV in the hunting world is thermal. The problem with the hunting realm is that that market isn't really willing to fund advancement in tech, at least quickly. Digital NV is popular because it has more value than analog, once you try to innovate and cause that value to reverse the market is gone.

Obviously this market has way different needs than the military but I just use it as an example of where the tech has come. Will going forward with it be hard? Sure. There are certainly paths to go down though.

On another note, I plan on doing some night shooting Saturday with Boog Bois.... Hopefully I'll be able to get some video

But yeah, disappointed to the Pro model release with such a lackluster pop. Is this officially being marketed as the gen 2 or just another version?

It's been several pages since I kept up with this thread

Have one helmet setup with the OG white sports.  Have another ready And waiting for the aurora pro 2s to arrive.  Happy to be able to afford a couple setups.

Got any statistics for that? Most people I know who hunt at night use a PVS-14 or Binos and an IR laser. Maybe a thermal, if they're feeling it, but most of the folks I know forgo night vision scopes and just go straight to either Thermals or PVS-14's.

Also, I wouldn't count on the military, they have been trying to develop digital night vision through Harris, L3, Wilcox, probably General Dynamic, definitely BAE, and definitely Raytheon for decades now. The bigger of those companies have the semiconductor research facilities necessary to investigate new avenues in CMOS technologies. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that Sionyx owns a semiconductor research division – how exactly do you believe they're going to make these leaps and bounds that even the world's biggest DefCons couldn't?

You could afford a used PVS-14 for those prices. Just sayin'

Why are you even in this thread?
You don't own a Aurora and pretty sure you've never even played with one yet you feel the need to hang around and poke at and talk down to those that own them and are perfectly happy with them.
Yes we get it they are no Gen III but for 99% of NV users no matter what you have it's nothing more than a toy.
A huge portion people that own fancy NV will admit that all it does is collect dust and comes out a few times a year to play around with and show off to your friends.

Even if I did I know it wouldn't matter to show you. You and I both know there is no good way to get solid numbers on that.

What I can tell you is that of the predator hunting forums and facebook groups that I'm a part of the OVERWHELMING amount of optics being pictured are digital NV scopes from ATN or Sightmark and thermal optics from ATN, Pulsar, or FLIR. Maybe 5% of the stuff I see in those are analog NV, and most of the analog stuff isn't gen 3. That observation isn't just videos from the optics themselves either, as that would obviously favor digital over analog, this is going by the kill pictures with the guns and optics shown. From first hand experience I can also say that of the group of night hunters that I personally know, they all have digital NV or thermal. And that is in WI where using IR or visible light to scan is illegal and gen 3 NV has a huge advantage in that department. I haven't seen the Sionyx or gen 3 NV being popular anywhere outside of arfcom, at least for hunting. I know both are being used in airsoft. At the very least we can assume that both your observations and mine are true and if we extrapolate that a bit then we could say that digital NV and analog NV share the hunting market fairly evenly, which is still far from the near uselessness, slow development, and limited market you've described. At least for that niche of the market.

The funny part to me is you felt the need to ask for proof to verify my claim and you haven't provided any for your own claims. You claimed Sionyx doesn't have the capability to do their own research on this yet a simple google search turns up several articles that attributes advances in this technology to research and development that they've been doing, and patents to go along with it. This was also mentioned early on in the thread. Now, I don't have the technical knowledge about semiconductors or image sensors to really know if these articles are over simplifying things or not, but it's still more information than what appears to be your opinion of a product you've never held.

Fanboying annoys me.

I actually did look into it, and you're right – I was wrong, their founders are both PhD's, with the older one being the former PI of the younger at Harvard. Looks like they've done some fantastic work in the discovery of a new form of Silicon; very nice! Considering that a new material is involved, that does hint at the possibility that I could be wrong about the possibility for advancement. Considering it looks like they've left Harvard, they will likely have trouble with further revolutionary development.

THAT said, I know the semiconductor industry, and if you're expecting anything earth-shattering after the initial breakthrough, you are generally going to be disappointed. But who knows, maybe I'll be wrong...

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Could be a marketing issue, but the chipset they display in use on both cameras on their site is the XQE-1310 sensor. Unless that's just a generic image, in which case, they need to update their marketing materials. The resolution appears to be the same across both models, as well.

And that is what I'm talking about, claiming similar performance to I2 in some conditions — whenever I see people making this comparison, it's usually in the context of "Sionyx and Gen 3 will give you the same performance enough of the time, so you should go with Sionyx because it's cheaper." Which, imo, is fairly misleading — that's like saying that Gen 2 gives you similar performance to Gen 3 in highlight and therefore you should go with it more often than not. I won't go so far as to say it's as bad as saying Gen 1 gives similar performance, because yeah, Gen 1 is awful and Sionyx is thousands of times better than that garbage. The comparison just comes off as inaccurate.

You're right, it could be a marketing issue, but without any official word from them I don't think anyone can say for sure. My assumption about the Pro is that the rest of the hardware appears to be the same, so that leaves the sensor or firmware. Unlocking additional capability on the firware side for a high end model is kind of shitty business, so I'm not ready to throw Sionyx under the bus for that. It seems more likely to me that they were able to figure out some improvements since the original release (probably on both the hardware and firmware side) and now there is a new model. It's just a guess though.

IMO, you're issue with the statements made about the Auroras capabilities is that it doesn't line up with what you think NV should be. That's just what I see from the scenarios you've presented to highlight the Auroras weaknesses. It's up to the reader to decide if their needs line up with the capability and I think everybody here has made pretty fair and honest admissions about the Auroras shortcomings prior to your arrival in the thread. If you are going to use NV in environments that contain some ambient lighting or if you can use IR illumination without being shot, then the Aurora is a legit option. It may not be 100% as good but the whole point is it provides VALUE for those uses. Especially when you balance in the additional features going digital brings to the table like color, recording, GPS, augmented reality, etc. $800 for the Pro is still less than analog and all those features of digital are more likely to be beneficial to me and how I will use it than gen 3 will. The fact is that even if you brought me a brand new PVS-14 and offered it to me for $800 I'd have to think about it, and that is exactly why the Aurora has value. Despite technically being inferior in its ability to see in low light it brings enough other stuff to the table to still be worthy of consideration and probably even come out ahead in that decision.

You're wasting your time, bruh, you're being rolled around in the mud I mean, on like page 3 or 4 is the info about  Sionyx being founded by a bunch of big brains from the Ivy League specializing in dark silicon - you'd figure by page 53, you wouldn't see "those are just COTS parts from China!" posts ???

I know a bunch of people watched Bill Blowers go up into the pitch black attic with his $8000 Binos and IR Light, but no one disagreeing that even a Gen 1 Sionyx would have worked just as well in that real world situation.

The comparison video showed me enough to pre-order - being an actual above board business, if the thing isn't much better, I'll just return it for a refund. If you wait, and get from Amazon (usually sold via B&H or Adorama) you'll literally have your money back the same day The UPS Store or Kohls scans in the QR Code.

I agree Sionyx could do better in many areas - I just don't think they have (or had - I detect a shift) "tactical" as their main focus, so a lot of the stuff "we" want, is back burner. We saw that with the Sport coloring. But consumer releases always trail development - they are probably working on stuff now, we won't see for another year, with changes catering to helmet use?

It's tough when you try to cater to different segments - how do you design something meant as a camera for a boater on a railing, or a wildlife photographer on a tripod, to also work 100% when mounted upside down? They almost would need to split the product line and basically produce a non-camera product. And if you do that, what exactly does ITAR have to say? Wasn't there some controversy with digital ATN scopes and an App, that got sold to overseas people? Sionyx does not want *any* involvement in ITAR what so ever - I gather anyway - especially with a current DoD contract.

I still manage to take pictures and videos on my (retail cost) $1000 cell phone, that are sideways or upside down - so Sionyx isn't alone in that area, LOL! It's annoying, but I just change the Geometry with a check box in VLC Player for self use, or re-render with VLC if publishing.

My number one wish for Gen 3, is OLED pixel response time, cut in half (8ms) or better. Come on SHOT Show 2021!

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I don't know how many pages back I reported that after updating one of my Aurora’s from the original firmware to the 2nd release, my first unit seemed magically to not work as well in mid moon and under circumstances.  I also had at time (and still do) a *2nd Aurora* with the original firmware and it still seems (to me) to work better.   It is not something I can easily quantify, and I have used them both many times side by side and sometimes I see it and other I don’t.  Generally, the upgraded unit seems to need supplemental IR illumination sooner than the one with the original firmware in less than ideal environments. (Anything less than full moon or lacking sources of ambient white light)

So, I’m not ready to throw SiOnyx under the bus either - but I also wouldn't put it past anyone to crippleware something, then sell “improvements” over time. Heck, FLIR got cold busted doing something similar.

You should factory reset and see what that does - you'll still be on the same firmware, but who knows. I updated on the OG and didn't notice any degradation, and run it right next to a Sport (different firmware) and they look identical. Also, coming from a "Mad Flasher" background with computer motherboards, sometimes the flash just jacks something up. You could also send it back for a warranty repair/check? I haven't seen anything on the FB Airsoft/Sionyx group either, about a systemic problem.

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As requested. Thanks for the suggestion..... coctailer

Vid is a little older now that SHOT is over but it just popped onto my recommended list and this seems to answer some of the questions that have been brought up.

Interesting, they all but admitted they are working on a NOD version. Detailing how they would do it, then not saying if they were doing it.

I thought the same thing

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When was the last firmware update?
I'm really hoping they release an update that allows turning off the peripheral data on the efv.

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