ATN X-Sight 4K Pro 3 - 14

I bought one last week, spent 3 rainy days playing with it in the house, and finally mounted it on a rifle. First impression was not great. It didn't seem to want to turn on, even after charging overnight. Contacted the company, and a nice young lady talked me through holding the power button down for 30 seconds to reset it. No joy. Try another 30 seconds. OK, got light in the screen. I thanked the young lady and went about reading the book and playing with the scope. To begin with, it is NOTHING like a normal scope. There are no turrets to adjust, all electronic. 

I looked out the window with it and adjusted the focus the best I could. At best, it's just not as sharp as I'm accustomed to seeing through an all-glass scope. But that's to be expected, as I'm looking at a tiny computer screen with limited pixels. The 4k HD moniker they stuck on it suckered me into believing it might be almost as good as glass. Nope.

Testing its night vision capability, I took it out on the back porch at bedtime and scanned the goat pens with it. There was faint moonlight through thin clouds, but all I could see was snow on the screen... like watching TV when the station goes off the air. No recognizable image, just black and white lines and dots on the screen. OK, so much for using it in available darkness. It's going to require the use of the huge IR illuminator that came with it (but I didn't have two 123 batteries to put in it). I swung it toward my security camera, thinking the IR light source from that camera might help. Nope. Gonna take a humongous amount of IR.

Today I took it out to my 100 yd range and spent the first hour cutting small trees, limbs and weeds and getting my table set up. Satisfied that I could see the target, I started the "One Shot Zero" process, reading step by step from the book. By the time I was ready to load one round to test my setup, the sweat was rolling big time. I set my bipod and sandbag to give me the elevation I needed, settled in and loaded. At 3X magnification, the center of the target was smaller than the dot in the middle of the crosshairs, so I zoomed to 14X. I carefully squeezed off the first shot. No way I could see the hole with the scope, so I drove down to the target to check it out. 11:00 o'clock high. I stuck my homegrown 1" spotter disk in the hole and went back to the bench. 

The "one shot zero" setting uses two sets of crosshairs, one white and one red, superimposed on each other. While holding the rifle steady with the white crosshairs on the center of the target (where they were when I fired), I navigated the sight's menu to move the red crosshairs to my black spotter at the hole. Satisfied that everything was according to Hoyle, I told it "Save and Exit". Time for the second shot, theoretically to affirm the corrections I had just made. Four o'clock about 2" from center. Rinse and repeat the above process for the new spot and try again. One o'clock about 3" out. 

I'm not sure I could have gotten it to the center with two boxes of ammo, as each correction sent it too far in the right direction. I even tried moving the red crosshairs halfway between the white crosshairs and the marked hole, still no joy. After 10 rounds and a gallon of sweat, I called a halt to the frustration and came back to the house for lunch.

After lunch I spent an hour removing the scope from the rifle and carefully packing it back in the box for its trip back to the store.

That's too bad, there are some good reviews for it online including a YouTube video from a guy after hunting varmints with it for a year. Are you going to try to exchange it for another to see if you got a lemon?

At this point I'd just as soon get my money back. As I said, the tiny LED screen is never going to be as sharp as a glass scope, and I'm not wild about not being able to make meaningful changes manually. It's got plenty of bells and whistles, most of which I'll never use anyway.

I used to sell these and the quality is very good on them but the drawbacks are exactly what you say. I stopped bothering with the night vision models completely and only sold the thermals and sold the crap out of them. The thermal has the same small screen issues but offer the ability to actually see in the dark without IR illumination. As a daylight scope they are not good when you compare them to a glass scope but when you have the thermal that really goes a long way toward making the crappy daylight images not seem like a deal breaker.

I used to sell these and the quality is very good on them but the drawbacks are exactly what you say. I stopped bothering with the night vision models completely and only sold the thermals and sold the crap out of them. The thermal has the same small screen issues but offer the ability to actually see in the dark without IR illumination. As a daylight scope they are not good when you compare them to a glass scope but when you have the thermal that really goes a long way toward making the crappy daylight images not seem like a deal breaker.

I have the thermal and am very happy with it. Very handy for my purpose. Neat to see the heat signatures and surprising how long some things hold heat. 

I'd love to have a thermal, but I can't afford it. I had to squeeze to get the X-Sight 4K Pro. It was a serious disappointment. My ex-neighbor had one, and it did a great job on the hogs on his place. Mine likely was a lemon.

I have the thermal and am very happy with it. Very handy for my purpose. Neat to see the heat signatures and surprising how long some things hold heat. 

Yep. Thermals are amazing. The ones we used at the fire department for searching buildings could pick up the temperature difference from just laying a hand on an object for a few seconds for at least several minutes. The thing that amazed me was how well it could pick up blood trails. Even an hour after a critter was shot just the temperature from the water evaporating from the blood and the blood oxidizing stood out like a sore thumb. Those units cost $20k at the time and are clearly a lot more sensitive and has far greater resolution than what goes into a rifle scope but they are pretty cool to play with. I always thought it would be cool to take one into the woods in the winter when chasing the little white bunnies, be almost like being a "Predator" from the movies.

I bought a Seek Thermal Imager a couple of years ago that works surprisingly well for its cheap price tag. It attaches to your phone via the charging port and uses the phone's camera software to display the image.
Here's a pic of one of our cats.