I recently purchased an RH25 and helmet mounted it with my Pvs 14. It's beautiful and crisp, but I'm not in love with it. I can't see anything in the woods, the trees give off so much heat it makes it impossible to see. it is good for dark corridors or underpasses, and spotting targets in a clearing but I was expecting a bit more. Have any other RH25 users here experienced this? I'm curious to hear other people's opinions, do I have a common setting messed up maybe? It's also incredibly heavy with the pvs14, my neck is fine but its hard to lean down and aim at anything without my helmet slipping.
- Thread starter joww
- Start date
Adjust your contrast down and your brightness slightly up. On the helmet issue, what counter weights are you running?
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Hands down heavy wooded areas have been the most difficult to use any of my thermals in. The RH25 struggles just like any other thermal, and as stated by Horta and Stokes messing with the settings will definitely help but heavy woods are my least favorite and least effective place to use a thermal.
Hey thanks for responding, this was an older thread but I still don't have a satisfactory answer. I think it's more than a settings issue but you guys can tell me if this looks normal for the rh25. Here is a video example. I am currently waiting to hear back from Infiray and the store I purchased it from. You can see how everything pops white when its toward the outside of my view but when I look directly at it, it turns into a muted gray soup.
That looks as per usual due to the auto contrast adjust to show you more detail on items of interest.
ah, is there anyway to turn that off? or limit it? its out of control imo, and i dont see anything like that in the manual
Different cores handle that differently. After trying literally everything available on the market (multiple models from every major brand either owned or borrowed), I’ve set a hard rule for myself to avoid disappointment:
BAE cores only.
I can pan around with any BAE core (BAE, P.O.T., Trijicon, NVision) unit without the unit “panicking” when it encounters a different hillside or part of the skyline.
All units react to changing scenery, but BAE cores do it pretty gracefully with the actual needs of the human eye/brain in mind.
Your options from spendy to cheap are:
Voodoo-S (most versatile)
Skeetir-X (best for your application)
Nox 18 (very versatile and excellent for your application)
Skeetir-L (excellent for your application but slightly less resolution and no warranty or factory support).
Other people may be different from me optically or neurologically and have a different experience. I’ve also found terrain/weather combinations can completely mask or exacerbate this issue so many users don’t know how frustrating this can be because they haven’t experienced it… yet.
It happens in varying degrees and your video is actually very mild.
BAE cores only.
I can pan around with any BAE core (BAE, P.O.T., Trijicon, NVision) unit without the unit “panicking” when it encounters a different hillside or part of the skyline.
All units react to changing scenery, but BAE cores do it pretty gracefully with the actual needs of the human eye/brain in mind.
Your options from spendy to cheap are:
Voodoo-S (most versatile)
Skeetir-X (best for your application)
Nox 18 (very versatile and excellent for your application)
Skeetir-L (excellent for your application but slightly less resolution and no warranty or factory support).
Other people may be different from me optically or neurologically and have a different experience. I’ve also found terrain/weather combinations can completely mask or exacerbate this issue so many users don’t know how frustrating this can be because they haven’t experienced it… yet.
It happens in varying degrees and your video is actually very mild.
I expect an in depth review of the RH25 to come out in the next few weeks from Stokes and it will give you a good baseline on what to expect from your unit as well as what is adjustable and what is not.
Here is a short teaser.
Here is a short teaser.
Thanks for posting this, thats what I was wondering - is this normal. Judging by your reply it might be. I am still going to talk with iray but I apprecaite the great breakdown.
Doesn't all thermal do this to an extent? I've always just assumed this auto-contrast thing was a function of having to divide a fixed number of color shades amongst whatever range of temperatures you have in the FOV at any moment.
My experience is mostly with a FLIR-cored 640 Zeus and Iray MH-25. Both those units will show quite a bit of what I call "false hot" when looking at the terrain, until an actual hot object enters the FOV. Then they auto-adjust the contrast to make the hot object pop out more (brighter white or darker black depending on color pallet selection) from the background. When an animal or person is present, there is no doubt. But when nothing is there, you might stare at a rock for a long time wondering. It takes practice to know what you are looking at.
Coincidentally, this is a big reason I really like the red-alert style color pallet in the MH-25. I find that it almost never lights up a terrain feature orange except at the very edges of the view in passing. On mine, if its orange its alive. The Zeus has a similar color scheme, but its absolutely terrible. Everything is highlighted orange all the time until you see an animal, then it fixes itself, so you may as well be in black hot. But then, the color scheme just distracts from being able to see details on the animal.
My experience is mostly with a FLIR-cored 640 Zeus and Iray MH-25. Both those units will show quite a bit of what I call "false hot" when looking at the terrain, until an actual hot object enters the FOV. Then they auto-adjust the contrast to make the hot object pop out more (brighter white or darker black depending on color pallet selection) from the background. When an animal or person is present, there is no doubt. But when nothing is there, you might stare at a rock for a long time wondering. It takes practice to know what you are looking at.
Coincidentally, this is a big reason I really like the red-alert style color pallet in the MH-25. I find that it almost never lights up a terrain feature orange except at the very edges of the view in passing. On mine, if its orange its alive. The Zeus has a similar color scheme, but its absolutely terrible. Everything is highlighted orange all the time until you see an animal, then it fixes itself, so you may as well be in black hot. But then, the color scheme just distracts from being able to see details on the animal.
Yeah, it's what everyone else said, similar auto-scene balancing to what your camera phone does. No, no one has manual black point/white point anymore, and you wouldn't like it.
My BAe Oasys core can even do this, but is generally better than others, I agree with Evolution 9 on this also.
What ambient temps in the example scenes? As air temps get up towards skin temp (say... 84°F for people) it gets harder to use thermals for much, but here in winter months is where they really shine. But... these mostly look good to me. Just thermal is weird, try it out more till you get used to the vagaries of thermal viewing.
My BAe Oasys core can even do this, but is generally better than others, I agree with Evolution 9 on this also.
What ambient temps in the example scenes? As air temps get up towards skin temp (say... 84°F for people) it gets harder to use thermals for much, but here in winter months is where they really shine. But... these mostly look good to me. Just thermal is weird, try it out more till you get used to the vagaries of thermal viewing.
It was around 60 degrees at night, all of my testing has been around 60-70
so after talking with iray, they said this is functioning as intended. apparently its because there are hotter things next to those people so it mutes them. it makes sense, unfortunately it happens a lot.
