Howdy, guys and gals! I'm Kyle Broderick. Welcome to the Social
Regressive. You've probably seen a couple of the recent videos where I have been
testing out night-vision gear doing some scouting especially after dark and that
has been just a whole lot of fun. We also did some some camo tests. this has been a
little bit different for me I usually wake up really early in the morning in
order to film these videos for you guys and instead of been staying out really
late at night so that might be why there's a little bit of a slowdown in
video release but I did have a really good time with some buddies going out
for hogs and it all worked out really well and I'm going to be able to roll in
a little bit of footage as we talk about the gear that we use and the one that
I'm gonna Center on today this is the night optics century 14 a lot of you are
already familiar with the pvs-14 that the military uses and that's going to be
a Gen 3 I believe monocular and like you know for those of you that aren't
familiar with some of the military hardware if you watch a movie that has
you know some operators going out doing operating things they're gonna have one
or two of these hanging from their helmets these are the ones that are
gonna be just kind of sticking out in front and these are one X binoculars and
this particular one this night optics century 14 it takes that same package it
takes the same sort of controls takes the same kind of build the same uses and
this is its own kind of special thing you can kind of change out what's in
here and night optics came up with a really sweet little formula this is
using what's called the brilliance 3 intensifier some of you may know that
these go in generations there's a generation one which is like the old
starlight scopes and you back in Vietnam and actually
before that and yeah then eventually we start stepping up into Jen - Jen 3 and
kind of the current is the gen 3 or Gen 3 plus one of them gets you a little bit
more longevity one of them gets you a bit more intensification so you can get
a bit of a prettier image and this right here is something a little bit different
this appears to be a proprietary intensifier called the brilliance 3 I
haven't heard of this before this seems to be just a night optics thing
and it works out really really well it seems to get you it seems like almost a
gen3 image it's it's definitely very bright
you don't need any kind of active illumination like you get from an
illuminator like this one this is a an evolve oh and I'm going to talk about
this here in a second but for a lot of the older generation night optics you
had to use some kind of illuminator to throw some infrared light at a target
you get the bounce back and you can see but with this you really can work by
starlight and we proved that in some of our own testing so yeah this right here
I have a little cheat sheet right here to help me with some of the specs like I
said this is a 1x it has a 26 millimeter objective lens and that's an F 1.2 for
you guys that are optics nerds that's a pretty darn wide-open lens that's gonna
suck in a whole lot of light so that's a good start to begin with also out on
this end I'm gonna go ahead and take the lens cap off since we are indoors you
don't want to take this thing out during daylight you could actually damage the
the delicate instruments inside here by taking it out but now you can see the
lens right here and it has a D mist filter on the
outside here to to kind of I think prevent fog from building up as you
might expect there is no reticle inside here this is just a monocular but you
can't actually get a kit that will mount this to the top of a rifle and then you
can put in front of it some kind of env compatible red dot
sight like an EOTech or an aim point there are a bunch out there that are env
compatible I tried a Bushnell TRS 25 and even on its lowest setting it was still
way too bright it was totally blowing out the image but yeah make sure that
you have an env compatible one and you should be able to use this to just kind
of you know take off your helmet off your tripod however you're using it put
on the rifle and then you can use it to actually take some game or plinking
after dark so some of the other specs on here the warranty is for two years the
operating temperature is anywhere from a negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit up to
125 degrees Fahrenheit which is pretty impressive a lot of these things tend to
fail you might want to make sure that the battery that you use is one that can
handle temperatures that low as well and actually this is a really good time to
point this out this is not some kind of exotic battery that this uses you won't
believe this it looks like it's for a cr123 which is what you typically are
going to expect from a you know some kind of site like this an electronic one
this takes double lays and it doesn't just take double lays it lasts a really
really long time on one double a and this is one of the things that I just
love about this anytime I get some kind of electronics one of the big things
that I'm thinking about is what kind of battery does it use first off is it a
battery that I can easily recharge or is it one that I can buy off the shelf if I
need to go out and find one if I'm on a trip and a battery dies can I go run
down to the convenience store or something and get something to replace
it or something that I just kind of keep in my bag at all times so yeah this is
actually using the original battery that shipped with the unit this came you know
in the device in the box and so far it is still running after all the eight
times that I've gone out with this to scout and a couple other little trips
just to get some extra footage like testing camouflage it's still running
and check this out the battery yeah one double-a lasts for 40 hours as long as
it's a good double-a and this one I have that rayovac that originally came with
it this one accidentally switched on and left in the box for a little while so it
died on me but I put in a couple of Panasonic and Aleut rechargeable nickel
metal hydride batteries and yeah that one's still good to go it's it's running
just great I love the fact that you can have just a simple off-the-shelf battery
and you get a ton of life out of this I was expecting this to really suck up a
lot of juice and it does not so some of the accessories that come with this
first off you get this nice little hard case
here and this is it looks kind of simple but actually it's not it does have a
gasket running around the lid right here so in addition to this device itself
being waterproof actually down to sixty feet if you want to keep rain off it and
you know maybe help the unit float if you accidentally drop it off a boat or
something yeah this is actually a waterproof case as well it's it's quite
rigid this is not like your typical cheap pistol case that you get this is
very thick it seems to be made by a very good vendor and then you have kind of
the the pic free foam down here so that you can just drop this in and it should
be very secure this also comes with they included a fun little sticker I was kind
of hoping this would be night vision compatible you know and it would bounce
things back it's just a a white sticker you can slap on your car but also comes
with a full manual to tell you all the things you should not do like taking the
lens cover off in the Sun and yeah just how the various controls work and this
is one where you do have to be kind of careful about learning the controls
before you actually go out because these are a little bit fiddly if you go out
and try to mess with this at night without having tested it out beforehand
I think you're gonna have a difficult time so we're going to take a close look
at the controls on here they're like I say they're pretty simple but they're
they're robust and they work really well before we get down to checking out the
controls let's take a look at the overall construction most of this
appears to be made of some kind of reinforced polymer I'm not sure what
exactly is reinforcing it or what the polymer is but it looks like some stuff
that I've used on some other products and it's it's typically very tough and
also very light and in this case yeah the whole unit even with all the
electronics the battery installed this comes out to be 13 ounces which is if it
were a day scope it would be very light that would be on the very light side now
moving around to the front we have the lens cap over the lens that should be
protected from very bright lights I'm just here in the studio these are
not actually all that bright so we're okay
but we don't ever want to expose this to daylight arc welding that sort of thing
but this right here it absorbs lots of light and if you want to back it off for
viewing during the day this cap actually has a pin hole straight through it so
you can just keep this attached turn on your unit and then all the daylight
should be fine just don't ever point it directly at the Sun of course the
objective can be adjusted right here so you can focus on objects that are really
close like within a foot out to infinity and folks that are especially in the the
law enforcement end of things they're going to have to pick one when they go
into a situation like say if they need to go into a house there probably is
going to have to pick a good focal distance and leave it there it's not
going to automatically adjust this is manual other adjustments on the front
here this is the gain this is how you select how sensitive the sensor is going
to be when you start using it so yeah you can dial this back if you're getting
just a little bit too much splash from something like the illuminator right
here and you know if it's just too bright in your view you can crank it up
now remember as you do increase the gain you also increase noise which is again a
good reason to use the illuminator and you can see that this it has a little
illuminator built right in right into the face there's a little infrared light
bulb kind of like the bulb that you get on your remote control for your TV and
all of that is controlled here on the back this is where you cycle through the
various modes that this has so we have the off setting which were set on right
now there's on which should be showing some green yeah there we go
and then there's one more mode which is IR you can momentarily turn on that
front bulb just by twisting it a little bit or if you pull this out pull the
stem out and then pull it all the way over that will leave on that infrared
bulb so you get some illumination you might think that that little
doesn't do very much but it actually does it's good enough for navigating
inside a house for seeing all kinds of detail inside a house and you know in a
backyard too you can probably get out to about 25 yards or so and that's about
the the usable distance I think for that bulb I could be wrong but that's kind of
how it seemed to me for anything further than that we definitely wanted to use a
real big illuminator like this one continuing our exploration of the back
end of the unit we have the diopter adjustment so if you need glasses if
you're a little bit nearsighted farsighted whatever and you need to
adjust that's it right there you just turn this ring and then this is the
rubber eyepiece that comes with it this comes attached and you can't
actually just unscrew this if you want to be able to put on an adapter for a
camera or anything like that the rubber eyepiece is very important it's going to
keep stray light from getting in on the sides so that it doesn't disrupt your
image and more importantly perhaps for those that might have someone with night
vision looking back at them it's going to help seal up that eye cup and it's
going to keep the light that's coming out of this little the intensifier in
here it's going to keep that from spilling out and showing off your
location and when it comes to that just remember that passive IR is a great way
to go if you think that there might be somebody that's scoping you out with
some kind of night vision device so yeah you might want to keep that light off or
not use the rangefinder or an illuminator but then when it comes to
taking game yeah this is exactly the sort of stuff we want moving back around to the
front you'll see this little dial right next to the battery compartment and this
lets you adjust gain just like any video camera system if you crank this up crank
this down it's going to change the sensitivity and how much boost the
electronics are putting behind there kind of adding a little extra signal to
the chip in order to to read more information so what this does just like
with video if you crank it down you're going to decrease your exposure if you
crank it up it will increase it but it will also increase gain which is going
to give you some kind of snow in the image so
eventually if you crank this all the way up the image might kind of become
unusable it depends on what kind of illumination you have and then again if
you have an external illuminator you might actually need to be dropping that
gain so that you can get a decent view through the through this unit and this
actually has a built-in automatic gate which is really handy if suddenly the
lighting conditions change like say you get headlights in the face someone
switches on a spotlight someone comes into a room and flips the light on this
is automatically going to adjust it's going to cut it right down to a visible
image let's talk about practical application with this century 14 and how
it worked out for us in our expeditions and some of the other tests that we did
first off the image just overall is it's just beautiful you would be just amazed
the first time that I use this I just kind of turned it on in the house and I
was looking around and I was like man this is imaged it looks like garbage
it's just sparking all over the place it looks like the gain is really high the
grain is terrible and that's when I realized that even though it was totally
dark in the house I was seeing everything with the lens cap still on
this has a tiny little hole through it like I mentioned for being able to see
things during the day if you need to or other bright lights but then I took this
off and suddenly I could see the entire world in just vivid detail this can see
blades of grass thick this can see you know leaves hanging from trees this can
see all kinds of details as long as you roll that objective lens to the right
focus and it is good to some pretty remarkable distances we use this as a
spotting scope when we were scouting we had this mounted to a tripod we had a
camera mounted behind it using this little accessory right here this is
another night optics product this allows you to slap on a smartphone and then you
can just use the smartphone kind of look at that and that becomes your spotting
scope they have a couple other adapters too if you want to be able to hook up a
DSLR or some other kind of camera and I did kind of jury-rigged something so
that we could have camcorder behind it so we could get
footage that way as well tried both both of them worked really well if you have a
good battery life on your cell phone that's gonna work out great but yeah we
use this as our spotting scope and it worked out really really well especially
in concert with that illuminator with this as long as we had the illuminator
pretty much on axis pretty close we were able to get really good retinal bounces
off game out there so we were able to pretty well determine okay there is an
animal out there let's get a closer look at it and then in general we would go
back and look through it with the the magnified optic in order to see exactly
what it was so with this one we can see that there was an animal and with that
we could see what the animal actually was and in some cases it turned out to
be deer we were getting ready to you know take a shot lining up on something
and then we see the the big old ears so yeah if you have one of these I do
recommend that you pick up an illuminator because it is going to
really stretch out the distances like I showed there is a an infrared bulb built
into this but it's really designed for kind of closer use within 50 yards I
think you're gonna get some kind of bounce back and especially you know off
the retinas again you're gonna be able to see some things but if you want to
stretch out to in our case I think probably about 200 yards use these two
together and you can see a lot the total experience was exhilarating this is a
totally unique way to scout I've been out blasting prairie dogs for a long time
I've been doing some hog expeditions you can see some of the videos here I'll I'll
put them in a link somewhere around here but this was totally unique to be able
to go out when it's dark out all you have a starlight or maybe whatever
bounce is coming off the clouds and to be able to see game wandering around out
in the field and then to be able to make those shots make connections and yeah be
able to to find them later that was totally unique if you want to
you know just go with a guide company or something you got to go try it sometime
because it really was a whole lot of fun thank you to night optics for sending
these out for me to play with and thanks so much to the patrons of the
destructive arts that make these videos possible if anybody else wants to get
involved kick in a buck a month to keep the project going keep the
lights on I'll put a link around here somewhere thanks especially to the 300
Win Mag patron of the destructive arts peter and we have a whole bunch more
interesting stuff coming up make sure you subscribe make sure you hit the
notification bell because we have all kinds of neat tests coming up new rifle
builds and then we have some of the reviews of other products like these
calls that we use in order to bag the coyotes I'll see you guys around thanks for
watching if you like this video be sure to LIKE share and most importantly
subscribe even if you didn't like this particular content go ahead and
subscribe there's probably something coming that's more up your alley check
out this playlist right here this is going to have videos in a similar vein
to what you just watched these two videos we cherry picked for you and
finally the social regressive is on patreon so you can become a patron of
the destructive arts and earn some goodies while helping us to provide high
quality videos just by kicking us a few bucks a month thanks a bunch for your
patronage