Hi All,
It's been a while since I posted - I've been busy looking after my family for a few years, and when I did get involved in the industry, it wanted the skills that led me to understanding night vision technology rather than the knowledge itself. Life is full or ironies like that.
Anyway, a long time ago I think I said something along the lines of thermals being cheaper than other night vision by a long shot due to progress made in silicon factories where thermals were being made, market forces, and so on. A war in Ukraine also accelerated low-cost availability significantly. It was 15 years ago, but I think around 2025 was the estimate I made and I'm pretty close. I can't locate my original post so anyone who knows where it is, feel free to call me out if I remember it wrong.
So one day I look and there it is, a thermal riflescope for $980 or so... 25mm Objective lens, not much other information. The few reviews I can find are all paid, clearly faked where any real value is concerned, and a single thread on a UK forum suggests they are actually OK... For a little more AU$1066 Maybe just a touch under USD $700, I see a 35mm Objective lens option, very germanium looking in the image, and very few specs. I had told myself I'd buy the first thermal riflescope that comes up under AUD$1000, and it's a touch over, but not much and it's an option so I justify paying the $50 or so more for the bigger lens, because you should normally always choose the biggest lens. Sales also show this lens is the most popular size for the cost.
Specs online are interesting.
384*288 res ( now a little low, but was once the entry point for $10K thermals just a decade ago ).
1024x768 ocular res ( because that's pretty normal for a few years ).
USB Interface ( For what? And Where? )
No pictures of any rifle mount rail. And what *looks* like an inbuilt rail seems to be the USB port.
Nearly no instructions.
Manuals all over the world suggest no rifle function.
16x magnification. ( really... It says 1x to 16x with a 384x288 pixel sensor, which is something like 24 pixels across by 18 pixels deep. About the resolution of a smiley
).
It takes pictures.
Available in 25, 35, 54 and 75mm objective.
All the images show *exactly* the same scope, except the text on the side changes... Regardless of lens choice.
I'm concerned it's a fake ad, because everyone knows that is pretty common on Aliexpress, and the lack of images while mentioning high end scopes is concerning, and things don't seem to match up in the description so well, especially so for a company that specialises in thermal scopes.
I'm concerned I might get a digital visible light scope, because the vis camera scopes are all around that price. Also not a single review anywhere that mentions whether this thing will mount to a rifle, though the vague UK based post suggests they do, and there are no reviews on the sale page.
And I'm concerned because Russian forum posts suggest it doesn't like high recoil ( though I only found one post anywhere, good or bad ) and may not handle higher calibers too well. Though I am planning on putting it on a 17HMR, so that's no issue for me.
Clearly there's a significant risk at this point that I am going to lose my money, and there is no certainty it will do what I want, so like an idiot I hit buy and wait for it to arrive.
And a week later, it arrives. I open it up and find it's a A-BF RX-108 which they say is the same as a HT-C8, which IS a thermal. All versions of this scope online have zero reviews, and a vague advertisement on Amazon that looks like they pulled the ad... But what comes out of the box looks like a bona-fide thermal riflescope.
So what did I end up with? Well, I'll get around to a full review if anyone is interested, but I was hoping anyone who has links to existing reviews, when mounted, could point them out to me. In the mean time, it comes in a nice case, which is a plus for chinese stuff, which normally comes in a cardboard box. It has a riflemount and the mechanism seems reasonable. The thing that looked like a riflemount is actually a USB C port, and the focus knob is the battery cover. It's a lithium rechargeable, and seems to work OK.
Initial impressions? Well, what looked like a plastic housing is some kind of anodized aluminium at a guess. All screw holes are sealed with silicon, and it looks water resistant. The battery was fully charged ( they did say they'd check it before shipping ) and it came right up in green/blue that would match what people on the MK-Ultra program likely saw the world looking like, and it had a 35mm thermal lens. So far so good.
The logo picture is blurry as heck, then suddenly gets sharper when the image from the front comes on, and I realize the logo itself is actually blurry. As in, some artist said "Lets make a blurry looking boot screen" because, I don't know, they probably don't use optics. It's got some chromatic aberation in the ocular which is much worse when off-axis, but the objective seems good. Very good. I move it around and it feels solid, and unlike most cheap thermals get a razor sharp focus from 2 ft distance to infinity, which makes this very useful for other applications - and I realize that if it doesn't break, it's cheap enough for that purpose alone ( I repair old computers, and this focuses up tight on them to find bad chips. ). Even my wife notices this is quite a sharp image inside - much sharper than my quality-Dahua 640x480 imager. And the controls all work well, except for the convoluted menu system if you want anything more serious.
I'm starting to be seriously impressed when I realized I have no control over the NUC process, and it's a two second freeze screen, which is going to interfere with some uses quite a bit. I check with the seller and they confirm there's no way to address this. As a result, it's possibly fine for general pest control once you're aware of that, but completely unsuited to any situations where the target may fire back, even as an observation scope.
A choice of reticles ( and it DOES hold the reticle position on power off ) and it has preset ranges for other,10,30,60,100,300,600 meters to allow for drop. The magnification is just made up - it's around 1.8x or so at unity, and maybe 3x that at the 16x setting, but a 2x to 6x digital zoom is actually much better than a 1 to 16x zoom for this size thermal sensor and I can set up the distance of the reticle without going into the menu system.
So I haven't checked this thing out on my rifle yet, but hope to do so next weekend and see how it performs, zero it in and set it up. It doesn't have a profile for different rifles, but does display it's zero for each range so that you can manually move between rifles when the zero is known ( I have no idea how repeatable this is yet ). Also I have no idea how it handles recoil, but they do have a very larue-like hammer smacking a sled on which one is mounted to test for shock when I found the factory videos, and they claim it can handle it - though it's clearly small screws so I doubt it would sit on any calibers over .223 ( 5.56 ) without serious risk of damage.
Happy to fully review and document how it went and what it's real capabilities are, but as mentioned, I haven't been around for a while so maybe everyone already knows about this? So what does the forum already know about the RX-108 or the HT-C8 models?