SiOnyx Aurora Sport Review ~ As good as Gen 2?

this video presented by Phoenix Rising our mission to investigate the psionics Aurora sport and determine its capabilities features compared to Gen 2 and Gen 3 night vision and determine if it's worthy of procurement hi Phoenix Rising here and tonight we're going to be doing a review of these psionics Aurora sport greatest latest digital night vision from psionics best thing since sliced bread good as Jen - maybe Gen 3 let's find out this device is a $400 digital night vision it's got a perfect price point for entry-level buyers and somebody who wants or needs some kind of night vision capability without breaking the piggy bank because they're not going to use it all the time or you know whatever that being said there's been a lot of hype on this thing being as good as a gent or Gen 3 well what we're gonna do in this video is we're gonna do a walk around the unit up-close going over all the controls kind of settings menus a couple of pointers on battery and one setting in particular that you will want to change depending on the circumstances to get the best quality you can out of the device and then we're gonna go outside and side by side this was an MX 90 644 base gen 2 and a pvs-14 based Gen 3 so that's what we're going to do and the reality of it is is for a $400 price point this thing's a pretty capable device ok I bet you this is going to find its way under a lot of Christmas trees this year and to be honest I think there'll be a lot of happy customers because uh really this thing does perform very well for the price point compared to its original brother of the Aurora ok now you are given up a few things the Aurora with $700 this is 400 you're giving up the GPS function the compass the recoil activated video and the ability to be mounted on a rifle or actually maybe not you can pry still not to saw the rifle but the other ones rated for recoil of some kind this is not so you give up all that but you still have all the functionality of the night vision portion so psionics Aurora support let's go ahead and do a close-up on it get out in the field compared to Gen to gen3 and I'll let you be the judges this is a good value but I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised tabletop investigation ok let's get up close and personal with these psionics Aurora spork will go ahead and spin this thing around a little bit for you so you can get a good gander at it then we will go ahead and talk about the buttons the forum the function the doodads the good the bad the ugly and then we'll cut it loose and go out and look at some video footage or do some video footage okay so we'll start it to both side mode outside typical mode dial you have photo video loop recording playback and your Wi-Fi settings this is kind of a little bit spongy it doesn't have as good of a detent as I would like and I wish it was a little bigger a little rough rougher textured four gloved hands when you're out there fumbling around at night okay we'll go ahead and turn it on and you got to listen to the cool psyonix sound here ooh turn it on get your green power light over here you can go in this menu down on the bottom settings and turn off the sound completely shutter sounds and that little completely shutter sounds and that little digital buzz Wi-Fi you do have a Wi-Fi app you can transfer files so you can look through this thing I got I downloaded the app for Android and the app works I'm not that impressed by it which I'm not impressed by the streaming stuff that much anyway but the thing that got me is if you're set up to stream to your phone you get a message in the back of your viewfinder so you can't be looking through it streaming it to your buddy's phone or any of that mess okay it's either going to the phone or go into the viewfinder kind of a bummer that would if you're gonna have that that would be a nice functionality to it which is not present so that's your mode dial okay talk about photo mode for a minute a photo mode does not give you any better resolution than your video okay this is going to give you a 1280 by 720 image which is basically one you image which is basically one frame of seven 720p video so is it to have a value I guess so you can change your shutter speech you can shoot burst mode with it you can do panorama selfie time-lapse but again the resolution is so low very limited added value there okay now there okay now movie mode 720p not much there you do have electronic image stabilization you can turn on via the menu HDR and you can select frame rates which go from seven-and-a-half to fifteen to thirty to sixty and has a slow-motion mode which I guess records probably at 60 frames a second and then place it back at 30 or fifteen again you could do that post-processing that's kind of just a glittery buzzbuzz thing so 720p video now your menu buttons up top here we'll talk about the functions there but know that you have with the press of the set button you go to a specific menu for each of these modes for photography for movies and that's where you can set a number of functions related to just whatever mode you're in if you press and hold this you're going to come up with a separate menu that's going to allow you to just screen brightness I EVF time out a couple of other things but the most important thing it's going to let you do is set your night glow mode why they call it that I don't know it's set your night glow mode why they called it that I don't know it's a dumb name okay but what night glow mode does is when you're in night mode it changes the way you're going to perceive this thing whether it's color mode night color grayscale or green and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment but to get to that function and you will need to you will want to press and hold the set button to bring up that separate menu and it doesn't matter whether you're in photo mode or video mode or whatever press and hold it and you can get there so let's talk about your buttons on the top you've got your shutter release button which is a coarse shutter or start/stop video if you're taking pictures yeah you can do two-and-a-half 5 or 10 frames a second whatever again I'm not impressed with the photo mode so you can have at it however you like there as far as you menu menu button and your directional pad the directional pad when you're not in the menu has two functions your right and left buttons will do your digital zoom in or out and to me the digital zoom isn't very usable your cell only 720p resolution in the first place guys so at that kind of a resolution pixelate it and zoom it in yeah this you got it if you want it but really not much added value with the digital zoom on this particular device with its low resolution the next thing is your up and down buttons well do you do your adjust your exposure on this so your evie setting is up and down goes between these two buttons and that that's a useful feature for brightening or gaining up gaining down a little bit that you can tailor your image for a little better view ability there now if you are recording video your Eevee buttons won't function normal your menu buttons okay just so you're aware so that's all the functionality on these buttons here I'm not going to show you the menus in the back you can take a look at that just trust me that I kind of went over some of the settings but that again that night glow mode is very important and here's why okay this camera is basically for anybody who's played with photography this camera functions in aperture priority mode okay if you don't know what that is basically you have three variables that are going to determine getting the right light to make an image okay you've got shutter speed or how fast how much light is going to allow in for what time period to the sensor for each frame you have your ISO or your that would be like your gain how much you're going to amplify whatever signal does get to the sensor right and that's again is so there's no ISO settings in this but it does gain up and gain down using what would be the equivalent of an ISO setting so the camera controls those two things the third variable is your lens opening or aperture the camera has no control over that that's entirely up to you based on where you set your scene selector dial or ring okay so let's talk about that let's first know that a larger number F number is actually a smaller lens opening and it's less light coming to the sensor so let's we're in day mode right now let's go around and look at the front of our sensor okay get it down here to where we can see and if you can read the front of this it says F 1.4 F 2.0 and then F 5.6 okay now we're in day mode and that's the smallest aperture because if it's bright out this sensor is really tweaked for high performance and light gathering so you don't want a lot of light coming into it in a day mode you need to restrict that because even if it's using one eight thousandth of a second it might be too bright okay so looking at this you can see the aperture in there that F five point six aperture small pinhole dot there let's go ahead and change that to twilight mode okay did you see the aperture just open up let me repeat that okay that's F 2.0 now we're letting more light in for Twilight or just after dusk because you need it okay again you're controlling the aperture the gonna set the shutter speed and it's going to set the and the how much it's amplifying things okay now I'm gonna go finally to night mode see that now we're as wide open as possible now do you also see that kind of a red flash what that red flash is is that's what separates night mode really aside from the aperture that's what really allows this thing to work well at night and what that is is if you'll notice these little squares on top of your modes you'll see them shade in shade and hey that one's uh I may be lit because you can't see that because I don't have the camera close there we go they mode it's shaded it's shaded it's not and really what that actually is telling you is we are moving what's called an infrared UV cut filter out from in front of the sensor and replacing it with just a blank clear piece of glass and that red flash you see when we go to night mode is a glimpse of that as it's being moved out of the way a reflection now what does that really mean okay these sensors in here can see a broader spectrum of light than the human eye can okay they can see a little ways into the infrared range or I mean the ultraviolet range which is you know when we see black lights and you know if you look at a black light you ever been to Spencer's gifts or one of those places they've got the black lights going and if you look at him your eyeballs feel weird and it makes some things glow well what's making it glow is ultraviolet light that you can't see hitting pigments that are responsive to ultraviolet okay so but it goes into a range this goes into a range the sensor can see into that range farther than our naked eye can okay and on the other end of the spectrum into your red zone you go beyond the human visual range into near infrared and this camera can see that okay but we block it because we want it to show us pictures that look like what we perceive so when you go to night mode you can hear the click as that filter gets moved out of the way now this thing is seeing everything can see the broadest spectrum of light it is capable of seeing and that's why all your colors go really wonky when you go to night mode as well because now we're seeing everything that it can see being translated into light we can see so the colors are going to be all wonky and that's that now I'm going to throw one other little fun fact out here is you're when you're in this night mode and you've removed that filter I don't know if any of you have watched like you know the ghost hunters and all this paranormal stuff they got on TV now right and you know these people will be out there and they'll be you know hunkered down in the house with their special lights and opening bring me bring out the full-spectrum camera this magical device it's going to gonna see the hobgoblins the spirits and the monsters and all that other good stuff well guess what when we switch this the night mode what we've just done is converted this little seven 720p video monocular into a full spectrum camera so now if you didn't have a reason enough to be interested in buying this thing and you know the real proof is gonna be when we take it out in the field and uh look and see what it can do you know if you want to go and see if the raccoons what's getting into your trash can see Bambi out there across the field or the feral hogs or whatever else is going on hey you know you can also swing by the local graveyard and you know see if uncle Ernie's still hanging around there go to the haunted mansion and make sure that the spirits are at rest out there you can do your own paranormal activities so there you have it night mode full-spectrum psionics sport okay one last thing I want to go over we've looked at the front in case you notice see how this is smooth this is a flat piece of glass a protective layer but I wish they would have put a raised edge up around here to stop you from getting fingerprints and smudges on it and also protect it if you bang it a little bit from breaking that glass so psionics please put that in there you got a little hoop thing here to put a wrist strap on this says psionics Aurora and it doesn't say it but it's a sport model damn it it's made to be running marathons within her climbing mountains give us a wrist strap okay it's two dollars for pete's sake make the sport sporty okay enough of that let's go ahead pull back off and take a look at the battery and the SD card okay little release down here pull it just a little bit and it will release an end pull it just a little bit and it'll release and then pull your viewfinder module out okay now you can see this is the only catch - told Matt in not a lot of grip not a big bite and it's only on one side and you have a rubber seal around here and it's only on one side and you have a rubber seal around here so I'm not kind of questioning how well this environmental seal is based on the fact you only got to one little catch okay now two things of interest in here this is where you're going to put your 30 up to 32 gigabyte SD card down in this little slot and this of course the normal little push it in and it releases this thing has a heavy spring on it okay you know you got to be careful you're doing this you know you'll shoot your eye out kid or shoot just card across the room I launched this thing boy it was pretty darn good and it's kind of tough to get your little finger in there to do it so anyway SD card slot we also have our battery in here which is removable and you can get spares okay you'll notice you've got to catch kind of up here in the corner kind of hard to see pop that or push it down pop that or push it down okay there we go that time it popped out good sometimes you got to kind of heal tap it a little bit here to be able to get your battery out now this isn't the hey wait that doesn't say psyonix on it what the hell is going on here holy smokes this isn't the original battery here is your psionics rechargeable battery ESX 50 is there part number that they've labeled this thing okay now thanks to the internet and other people's research this battery is an off-the-shelf digital camera battery which happens to be a Fuji and p50 style battery if I get too focused Fuji and p50 okay got the same cut out notch there you go same same same connector and connections on it 3.6 3.7 volta ghin not enough of a difference thousand and twenty five milliamps fourteen hundred and aftermarket battery manufacturers always hype higher numbers because they think a hundred milliamps is gonna make them bot make you buy their battery versus the competition all that being said to spare batteries microUSB to USB charger fourteen dollars on Amazon okay I've used these cast star batteries for oh I'm not I'm not getting a plug no shameless plugging for me but I've used this same brand for my Nikon one cameras for my Panasonic cameras and they've given me good performance held up very well and the Chargers have held up well to for a reasonable price so again there's another brow not saying this is the best brand out there but I'm saying I've used them for various devices and they seem to be a fairly solid brand as far as aftermarket batteries now a word of warning you use these and something happens you might avoided your warranty but I've never had that issue with any of the any of the devices that I've used aftermarket batteries in I've only ever had a couple actually even go bad on me over the years so that's my take on it your mileage may vary so there you have it Aurora sport let's go outside and play daytime video capabilities okay here we are in the backyard during daylight with our psionics rora in all its glory shooting beautiful 720p high-definition video footage at 30 frames per second to accompany that we have our trusty Panasonic GX 85 shooting in 1080p video also at 30 frames a second I just wanted to do this we're not going to spend a lot of time playing with this thing now as you can see both cameras are not having any difficulty recording video I just wanted to show what kind of quality you could expect as well as show you the digital zoom in the daylight okay so there we are resumed and all the way with our digital zoom and as you can see that's not very usable I'm not very practical and that's largely because we have a 720p image in the first place so we don't have a lot of resolution to pixelate with a digital zoom so there we go we're back to normal let's go ahead and we'll pan around a little bit then we'll switch it to Twilight mode and in the night mode just just to do a quick look see even though we have enough light to where we don't really need to do either okay so there use there's day mode now I'm going to go ahead and switch to the Twilight mode and basically Twilight mode changes what changes to that I know take place on the psionic s' if you go from an F 5.6 a relatively modest aperture on the lens to F 2.0 which allows a lot more light to come in now it may change how aggressively the sensor game goes up or I what we would call high ISO on a digital camera but psionics really doesn't say that and it does that to be honest I didn't see anywhere in the documentation it tells you what the effect of ISO range really is of the psyonix I know you don't have any control of it through the menus so that's I just don't have any information to share with you on that now so we're in Twilight mode and that would be more effective for right after sunset when it starts getting too dark for day mode go to Twilight okay now when you go to night mode it's going to open that aperture up to an F 1.4 as wide as it can go but it's going to do something else and I'm gonna toggle that real quick so you can see now I imagine the microphones on both cameras picked that up could you hear that click click click now what's happening there is as we're doing that of course as I said we're opening up the aperture all the way on the psionics the other thing we're doing is we're moving a special piece of glass out from in front of your sensor ok the name of that piece of glass is an IR UV cut filter what that does is you know when you're taking pictures with a camera or video you want the colors to that it's producing to look like what you see you want and at what you would call an accurate perception however your sensors that are in cameras they are capable of seeing into the ultraviolet range beyond what we can see by a little by somewhat of a margin and to a much larger margin they're also capable of seeing into the near infrared spectrum and that's all stuff we can't perceive that the sensor can of course right now this sensor has color renditions of his pretty crazy right that's not what you want to video or picture but to use these sensors for night vision it's highly beneficial because now I you're gonna get a much better image quality or much more light gathering capability albeit weird in the color rendition so that's your that's your IR UV cut filter the Aurora versus gen to night vision okay here we are in the backyard time to do some real comparison between a psionics Aurora sport and a Gen 2 night-vision device now I did check with it against check it against a Gen 1 and it's just way surpasses a most your commercial chief for Gen 1 stuff so I'm not even going to try because it's so difficult to record Gen 1 in the first place so here we are psionics aurora and an MX 96 40 for base Gen 2 night vision device now I'm just going to pan around the yard here the conditions we have tonight are its there's no moon out right now although it is a quarter moon but it's already gone down below the horizon good starlit night with no real cloud cover and and because I'm on the edge of town there's a parking lot several hundred yards away with arias lights and that's where you're getting most of your ambient lighting from that and you know street lights out front which really aren't impacting us back here but what is impacting us is those parking lot lights even though there are several hundred yards away looking up into the trees you can see they're throwing a lot of ambient light into the trees which kind of in a very diffuse way is getting down to ground level now from what I can see with the naked eye I can see the tree trunks fairly well because of that lighting and I can see the larger branches but beyond that I don't see perceive a lot of detail like what this night vision is showing so that's a comparison for the day that we have now let's talk a little bit about the psionics and in about the night vision and the differences in the images we're looking at here okay first off of course the standard night vision is green but monochrome one color whereas right now we have the psionics in its color nighttime mode so we're seeing an array of rainbow colors that don't look very realistic and the reason for that is because when we go into full night vision mode on the psionics what what we're actually doing is we're opening up our lens opening all the way to get as much light as possible then we're moving the IR UV cut filter out from in front of the sensor and we're probably there's probably another piece of blank glass with the same optical qualities it's going in place of it so what that does is that allows this sensor onto psionics to basically look and see part ways into the UV spectrum and to a larger degree into the infrared spectrum so all these sensors in cameras even your phone whatever they all can see colors beyond what the wavelengths that we can perceive with the naked eye but we limit them because we want our pictures in our images to see or to look like how we perceive the world when you talk about like the ghost hunting cameras and all this other stuff and they've got their full spectrum camera so they can see that the ghouls ghosts and hobgoblins and all that other stuff basically that's what the psionics is doing it's a full spectrum camera meaning it can see everything that it's capable of and is not limited to just a human visual spectrum that's why your color perceptions on the psionics when you're in night vision mode looks so strange so that's where it's coming from now the limitations of it compared to standard night vision or that it's 720p video okay so at 720p basically we have 1280 resolution of the screen or our view across and 1280 across in 720 tall that's fairly limited for resolution and when you're looking at the image of the night vision the Gentoo night vision you can tell that it has more detail finer grain to it so the psionics doesn't have the resolution now because it's dark enough out here in the shadows you can see on our regular night vision you can see that kind of sparkling shimmering look and that's the night vision it's starting to have to work pretty hard to give you a good image that's where that shimmering is coming from on a psionics it's having to do the same but but in color night vision mode you're seeing that as digital noise like you would on a low-light photograph and that's digital noise coming off the sensor compared to monochrome noise on the regular image sensor so they both have noise but the psyonix has a lot more noise it also has a lot lower resolution but where it does excel is looking at these images to me the gain is very similar between these two okay this is an MX 90 644 based gen 2 night vision same thing as military PVS for scopes used to be and it's a solid Gen 2 device and on this one it's my actually my Gen 2 scope and what I did was I I took the longer longer lens that I had on and off and put a 50 millimeter F 1 point 8 which again that's not that F 1.8 lens is closer to what a lot of night vision would have for handheld stuff so we're actually getting better brighter picture than I would normally have on this device I built so there's a difference is there now let's go ahead and I'm going to turn on an infrared illuminator and you're going to be blown away by this and wow what a difference huh that's like unbelievably bright now this is an 850 nanometer illuminator and it's not a high-end one it's actually relatively cheap on I'm gonna see if I got it on ok yeah that's actually on low it has three levels of brightness and that's on low so huh now let me go ahead and dial down there that's so blinding to the regular night vision I'm going to dial down the f-number on that to get my contrast back so and again there you have it this is psionics as good as a Gen 2 no but it's does give good amplification and and it's a pretty impressive device now considering okay if I were to go on fleabane and try and find a decent MX 90 644 image tube pretty much they're gonna run about they're running around $500 right now just for an image tube that you're hoping is a good one okay used psionics Sport $400 brand spanking new out of the box okay complete you don't have to do nothing but charge it and play with it and put a memory card in that's a hell of a lot of bang for the buck okay I'm not gonna lie that is that's that's pretty damned impressive so Wow sound export is it definitely has for the for the money I has my approval rating no doubt they're up let me came back up or not game back up but open my f-stop back up on the Gentoo so yeah I mean damn you I'm thinking that's pretty hard to go wrong if you were to get the sport now I don't know if I'd pay $800 for the regular Aurora to be able to put it on the on a firearm in front of or behind a red dot sight or something like that yeah GPS I don't care compass I don't care recall activated video I really don't care but again I'm willing to pump for $400 or 300 $2.99 with Black Friday sales the sports not a bad deal now what I want to do is I'm gonna go ahead and show you a couple things on this sport that it has a couple different screen modes if I can find the right buttons on this thing okay right let me know I'm gonna have to turn on my headlamp here for a second there we go okay what the heck I'm not getting my menu that's weird maybe I'm not pressing it in good enough oh you know why that's because I'm recording sorry I forgot okay I had to have to shut off the recording you can't get into the menu on the psionics when you're recording so there's one little learning curve thing okay here we go now to get into menus you have specific menus for each function on the psionics okay and and a quick press of your center button where your directional buttons are on the very top will get you there if you press and hold it then you have a global menu regardless of what function you're in and that's where we're at right now now I'm going to go into the night I don't know why they caught that that's kind of a weird name and you'll see that we're incurring I'm gonna take it to green mode first and show you this I don't like the green mode I think it's kind of dumb makes it look like traditional night-vision but as you can see it really washes out your image you'll lose contrast and detail it basically just makes everything green and I've you know there was kind of a similar issue I got to play with the sight mark Wraith digital night day/night digital night vision scope and it had a green screen too similar to this only much worse believe it or not so there you go if you're interested in the green screen on this psyonix I'm going to tell you that that's not all it's cracked up to be as you can see here okay if I started recording by accident I'm okay there we go I've got to find the right buttons here okay back to the psyonix again and let's go back to our night glow and I want to change it to grayscale and to mean grayscale is actually pretty usable looking at it it kind of looks like what a white phosphor screen would look like in traditional night vision but you lose color detail but your noise is less obtrusive and less distracting and now looking at it that actually looks to me a little better as far as from a night vision perspective now I'm kind of torn between your between your night vision color and and this monochrome and the reason I'll say that is although the monochrome the noise is much less distracting the one thing about the monochrome is you lose a little bit of information as you're looking at the image we don't have the resolution of a standard night vision but we do have good gain now in this mode it looks good but the the only thing I think that might make the color mode have the edge is that when we're in the color mode if I'm looking at something where the brightness of different objects is about the same but there are different colors that color mode might let me discern differences and pick out detail that I can't do in the monochrome mode okay so six of one half dozen the other probably situational as far as which one actually works better so that's it there you go psyonix Aurora and is it as good as Jen - maybe some Jen - better Jen - definitely not but hey for $400 be even being that close is a win-win okay let's go out front and play around in a little bit brighter light between these two and then we'll then we'll go and we'll take a quick look comparing it to Jen three okay we're back in we're now in my driveway on the front of the house and what we're looking at is we're looking down the driveway and and across the street and of course I have the psionic still in monochrome mode so it's a pretty good looking pretty sharp looking image now we're of course we've got some street lights here and let me pan around and just see what we can see here so there's a street light that's about 60 yards away and that house and let's see if I can focus on it a little better both devices now again I got so much light coming into the darn my Jen to actually let me dial us actually I'm going to turn a game down I can find my game knob on the back of this okay there we go that's manual gain and I just cranked it down because I was actually getting a whiteout condition on the front or on the bluntest thing okay so that's looking about as far as I can get away from looking in the driveway and the house that you're seeing in the distance is about a hundred and forty yards away so as you can see good TTL both of them the psionics images cleaned up an awful lot with this additional light and it's actually gotten so bright on our gen 2 that we had to turn the gain down to stop from kind of getting whited out okay now we're looking at the driveway let me go back and I'm gonna crank up the game a little bit and so there we go to me right now they're looking about equal but I've got actually got a little bit of extra gain on the night vision and of course I've got better detail levels so let's go ahead and pan around a little bit more and and you can see where the haze is we're almost seeing where those floodlights are in the parking lot two hundred yards away so okay so there we go there's Jen to comparison to psionics in the front I think I may even go down the road here just because ok we're down at the street and as you can see it's a wide-angle view and there's so much light that it's really limiting everything and I'm not even sure if I'm when I add this in but let's go ahead pan around a little bit again I have to game down on my Gentoo because it has so much darn brightness that it's limited so go ahead keep the game down and pan back around and looking at this let me see if I can focus focus on the looks like I'm about as far away focused on the salary because I can get and okay so there you go that's everything focused on the psyonix one thing I have noticed is the focus it gets to infinity focused pretty quick and then you really don't have to mess with it we're on regular night vision you tend to have have to tweak the focus a little bit farther out than you do on the on the psionics so that's just a observation so okay there you have it Jen - compared to psionics and now you know what let me do one more thing is I'm gonna take this psionics and I'm going to go back to its color mode because we're actually in a brighter area whoops I got to hold the button in to get to that menu so let's go back to our light glow light color and here we go in our night color mode and you can tell do you see different again differences in foliage color in differences because of whatever light sources happen to be around and that is an advantage again because that makes up in some regards when you have enough light it actually kind of makes up for not having the resolution because you have color information that will help you figure out what you're looking at in addition to amplified light so okay there you go that's it gen 2 versus of psionics the aurora versus gen3 night vision okay here's our second round of testing and we're again we have the psionics of our sport and now we have a Gen 3 pvs-14 again you know when we were using it against the gen 2 device the psyonix was coming close in some regards but not really up to Gen 2 levels but I did want to just show you compared to a Gen 3 pvs-14 where the psionic really isn't it kind of pales in comparison but you're looking at this gen 3 device that we're looking at right now this was a pvs-14 kit all the lens parts and other stuff and a blemish to new old stock tube so total price to put something like that together is you know twelve to fifteen hundred dollars ok look at that and here we're talking literally 1/3 to 1/4 of that with the psionic sport with know having the DIY or anything else ok that's that's that's a lot of bang for the buck it was it a lot of bang for the buck looking at it compared to a Gen 2 and even comparing it to the gen 3 a lot of bang for the buck now because we're in such a low light condition you can see we have a lot of color noise on a psionic so let's go ahead and I'm gonna switch to grayscale mode and the green mode that's again that's if I can find the right buttons here let me get in here the green mode is to me not very usable under any circumstances it adds a green but it loses you lose so much you lose so much contrast that it really is a waste of trying to play with it but grayscale on the other hand as you can see grayscale now that cleans up your image a good bit when you're really really pushing this thing hard okay you still have the noise but it's now monochrome it's not all this myriad of colors that although that can add detail and be helpful if it's too much noise I think it detracts so depending on the circumstances you may or may not want to run grayscale versus on nighttime color mode so so now we're looking at this thing and panning around in greyscale and there's one other thing I want to show you and that is both of these with two different illuminators we'll turn on our good old trusty 850 illuminator first and again when you look at it wow that's good that's that's a really good crisp image on everything's part and that's on low I believe so let's see I mean really all of our they're gaining down it's putting out so much light right so 850 illuminator and I also brought out here a 940 illuminator and that's low medium high and back to low and 940 illuminators work with Gen 3 and work with digital as well so again that 940 illuminator with this works very very well and with the added benefit of 9 40th is about sixty to eighty percent less visible to the naked eye at a distance than what t8 50 is so if you're out there trying to observe wildlife and whatnot you're much less likely to spook them or scare them off with the with a 940 than 850 and it works and it works fine with with the Aurora sport so there you go Aurora sport with pvs-14 let's go ahead and just turn off the illuminators and look up in the trees here and do one last pan around and I think I think that wraps it up I hope this has been helpful again when I looked at all the hype I was kind of skeptical of the Aurora sport and I still think when they say gen 2 equivalent not really but bang for the buck $400 for the capability you're going to get 300 if you can find it on sale boy that's the hell of a deal a hell of a deal on night vision so there you have it psyonix Aurora sport I hope you enjoyed my review of the psionics Aurora sport if so please like share and subscribe that's the fuel that keeps this channel going this video took a lot of time and effort to produce and while it's free to download for personal or educational use please link and give credit commercial use of this video is expressly forbidden without my written consent and hey thanks for watching dan Phoenix Rising here and tonight we're going to be doing a review of the Aurora sport by psionics latest greatest digital wonder night vision I'm not that bad that got that high Phoenix Rising here and tonight we're going to be doing a review of these psionics Aurora sport

Channel: Phoenix Rising

Views: 87,139

Rating: 4.8308024 out of 5

Keywords: night vision, SiOnyx, Aurora, nv, Gen 2, Gen3, Hunting, Observation, surveillance, digital, digital night vision, gen 1, color night vision

Id: sFJUz4HHnTs

Length: 47min 8sec (2828 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I keep thinking about these.