People often ask Thermal vs Digital (or Night Vision) ‘what’s the difference’
Here is a short summary of the key points; plus further down we have prepared 2 short videos comparing both the technologies and the 3 main scopes in our range
Thermal
Pros
- Detection – they are very good at showing you where the animals are
- They are excellent culling tools
- Zero Light needed
Cons
- Price
- Resolution – even a 640 is not even close to the resolution of a digital
- Low Magnification
Digital
Pros
- Price
- Resolution – see the animal, colours, markings, fur blowing in the wind!
- Low and High Magnification
Cons
- Requires light
- Doesn’t make the animal pop out – you can of course see the eye shine
One of the downsides of Digital used to be the HUGE torches required to make them work – this is a thing of the past – PARD’s are effective 400-600m out of the box and they are tiny!
Resolution to Thermal – Why Digitals show far more Resolution
The space between the pixels on a thermal is typically 17um (Microns) or some are 12um; vs a digital with can be less than 3um which is a huge difference, plus your typical thermal is 320 or 640 pixels across, vis 1920 odd of a digital, so there are a lot more pixels per square inch of what you are looking at.
The PARD 008 is just 2.9um – vs a 17um that’s 486% difference – plus since the overall numbers of pixels is vastly different – over 2 Million for the PARD, vs a thermal 320 scope at 76 thousand and a 640 at 307 thousand.