An Underestimated Factor
When buying night vision, user often stress about image intensifier generations and specs, housings types and other features such as manual gain and autogating, while completely ignoring one of the most important aspects about their device’s performance: Lenses
In fact, it can easily be argued that lenses are just as important as tube selection, and that buyers should focus on them much more than other aspects such as FOM, as poor lens quality will result in a steep loss in performance, even on the best and most expensive tubes out there.
Low quality lenses are known to cause detrimental optical effects such as edge distortion, lens flaring, loss of light transmission, graining and a foggy effect when observing well-lit areas.
For these reasons, it is generally recommended to choose milspec optics, as these will be held to a high standard of optical performance, but it is also important to know that those can be expensive, taking up as much as 35% of the price of an actual build.
A Worthy Commercial Option
Most commercial options will generally be much cheaper than Milspec optics, with the intrinsic tradeoff of worse optical quality, but this doesn’t appear to be the case for our comspec offering, in the form of YMON lenses.
These PVS-14 style lenses offer an amazing performance, very much comparable to that of milspec optics, both in terms of clarity, light transmission, chromatic aberrations, edge distortion and flare resistance.
As shown in the pictures (Carson/Milspec on the right), if we compare them side by side, we can notice that both objectives are coated with a nice deep blue anti-reflective coating, which in both instances greatly reduces (almost cancels) annoying flaring artifacts caused by shining lights at various angles
Both lenses also appear to have similar weights, with each Carson set weighing 113g and YMON coming in at a slightly heavier 115g.
Eye relief on both optics also appears to be the same to the naked eye, same goes for the field of view, amounting to 40° for both brands.
Both lenses provide exceptional clarity and light transmission, with Carson producing a very slightly sharper picture when looking at fine details.
Both of these optic systems are also smooth in fonctionnality and do not offer any unnecessary resistance when adjusting them with one hand as it is mostly the use case when used on a headborn system.
Down below you can observe their actual performance when stacked against one another, and judge their performance by yourselves. (YMON left, Carson right or Carson up top of the video and YMON below)
IIT specs:
NVT GEN3
RES: 64 lp/mm
SNR: 28.6
GAIN: 15139 cd/m2/lx
As you can see in the images above, YMON lenses appear to perform well, but if you look closely, you will see that they do have a slightly duller image, with some loss of contrast. This comes at no surprise considering the reputation and years of proven performance coming form the milspec set.
With that in mind, for the average night vision user this difference might not mean much when you start considering the price of each set vs the performace they bring to the table. YMON lenses sets comes in at 250 USD while the Milspec comes in at 650 USD. Both in the resolution test and the video the YMON still performed amazingly for a non milspec Singaporean optic set.
By far better than most propiatary optics you see on many chinese made devices, that might not prioritze optical quality in their full system.
In conclusion Carson / Noctis do outperform this commercial grade option, but not by a tangible margin for most applications.
For any professionals or people who use these devices where their life or the lives of other are at play, we always recommend to go with the best they can buy which would be Noctis Milspec PVS-14 optics.
This does leave room for the YMON to have it's place as a great alternative for night vison users with a tight budget, who want to prioritize IIT sepcs or housing feature sets without comprimising on optical quality.
In conclusion Carson / Noctis do outperform this commercial option, but not by a tangible margin for most applications.