Originally posted by kparker158
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During the day you locate the animal with your naked eyes and then you point your rifle at it, look through the scope and normally, you can see the animal. If you don't see it, you pull you head back, lean to the left, spot it again and move your rifle/scope to point at it and now you see it in your scope. At night....there is none of that. You have no forward vision with your eyes and no peripheral vision, which we also take for granted. If you don't see him in your scope, you don't see him at all.
Generally speaking, as the magnification goes up, the field of view goes down. To counter this, thermal manufacturers enlarge the objective lens size. The problem is, to completely counter that FOV issue, objective lenses would have to be huge and another side note but the lenses are not glass on thermals. They are germanium and it's one of the most expensive parts of the scope. Let's take a couple scopes as examples, the (discontinued) Trail XQ38 is 2.1x base mag and it has a 56ft FOV at 110 yards with a 32mm objective. The XQ50 is 2.7x base mag and it has a 42ft FOV at 110 yards with a 42mm objective. The objective lens size went up 10mm or 24% and there was still a net loss of 25% of the FOV by going up a little over 1/2 power of magnification.
The point is, generally speaking, the more magnification, the narrower the FOV and a narrow FOV and a high magnification are the 2 enemies of a night hunter. There are some exceptions to this rule depending on how you hunt, for instance, someone hunting hogs at feeders from a deer stand can get by with less FOV and higher base mag than a guy hunting the exact same distances doing spot and stalk hunting. Now to be clear, this does not mean that 4x or even 5.5x base mag is a bad thing. It just depends on your hunting conditions, shooting ranges, personal comfort levels etc.
Did I mention there is also a huge danger is getting too low of a base magnification? That's another topic for another day.
My advice to people is, call a good honest dealer who uses every scope IN the field and get his advice on what you need. Shameless TBH sponsor plug, we are one of those dealers. But I have a couple friends who are big dealers as well and they fit this bill too. Getting advice on what to buy from a FB group full of random people who've only looked through a few thermals is not a wise decision when it comes to spending this kind of money.
Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned it or not previously but since 4x magnification was mentioned, the Thermion XM38 4x has been discontinued and the FLIR PTS536 4x is gone too, so there aren't any less expensive/quality 4x scopes on the market right now.
I hope this helps a little.
- Jason
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