Oops, sorry I'm late ... thermal clipons ... oh boy ... let me take a deep breath and dive in
And even including the idea of head mounted spotter than can also be used as a TWS or clipon ...
==
When I started out in night ops shooting/hunting/critter control, 11 years ago, I thought I wanted a thermal clipon !! And my very first thermal was an Armasight Apollo42 336 (cost about $5k IIRC in April 14) and it worked, barely as a clipon. I used it as a handheld spotter a lot more.
Wow, such de ja vu, there's the 1st apollo on 22LR from back in April '14 for barnyard defense, in front of a VO 1-6x (rzr g2) ...
But then I had a "dream" of a thermal on my head that I could spot with hands free while moving and a year later, traded the apollo42 in on a zeus75-640 and a q-14 20mm 640.
The Zeus was great, the Q14 less so. I was able to head mount it. But not side by side with a 14 like I'd hoped.
Actually I was just an idiot - it could've been done, but I didn't know how at the time, I do now. So I mostly used it on the 22LR as barnyard defense.
It was fantastic in that role as it had a tight click value, 1/4 MOA I think ... I was head shootin' mice with it anyway. Inside 100yds it was deadly on coons, opossum, rats and later mice after the rats moved on.
==
Still pursuing my dream ... I next tried an old ATN gen1 ODIN ... had a FLIR core just like the Armasights.
and whah lah the ODIN did work great side by side with 14 ... whereas on my other helmet I had to swap between a 14 and the q-14.
==
So with the ODIN (and 14) on head I could roll on my 4-wheeler and see critters from 100s of yards away ... and even PID yotes sometimes. And once left the 4-wheeler running as sound cover, dismounted and snuck up within 100yds and got a yote that was playing with a field mouse and ignoring the equipment sound in the distance.
==
Fast forwarding to 2016-2017 ... I entered the world of the OASYS cored units ... tried a skeet320, and IR-Patrol, and SNIPE and a BAE UTC-x. Except for the SNIPE, those units were "other worldly" compared to the either FLIR tau2/quark cored units. The olde FLIR units had a distinctly "2D" image, looking like night versions of road runner cartoons. They got the job done, but the OASYS cores had a true 3D look showing all sorts of shading in the critters and vegetation.
Here's a skeet320 on left side on helmet with a 14 on right and a coti to enable snap shots with the laser. In the woods, the quick shots with the laser was a game changer. And the skeet320 could PID critters out hundreds of yards. TBH unless you looked real close, you couldn't tell the difference between the skeet 320 and the patrol 640.
skeet 320
==
Patrol 640
==
Both of those however sucked pretty bad as clipons, the skeet wasn't repeatable to remount as you had to essentially recollimate it with each remount. I did shoot some baby mice with it, but once I realized the limitation it went back on my head and stayed there. And with those earlier patrols, collimating it as a clipon was also tough, though it was repeatable and had a decent mount for the weapon, though that mount was heavy and had to be removed to tolerate it on your head.
Both the skeet320 and patrol spent 99.9% of their time with me as head mounted spotters and they were GREAT at that.
I now had great head mounted thermals, but still not really swappable to the weapon as either TWS or clipon.
==
On the left you see the UTC-x long distance thermal clipon and on the right the SNIPE. The SNIPE sucked, I won't say more about it (ask if curious). The UTCx was a whole nother world.
==
Day time, those trees on the ridge are 1800-ish and that's 16x on the day scope.
==
I've tried about 60ish thermal total that I can remember (I wrote em down a few weeks ago) ...
And plenty of chinese ones also ... pulsar, steiner, agm, genesis, iray ... and at close distances and low magnification that have some shock and awe to them, but I've also had them broke out of the box (atn) and fail of the first shot (agm) ... and have terrible images (1/2 the pulsars) ... and in general they just haven't come up to the same level of performance and reliability as the military grade stuff like BAE, trijicon, n-vision, LWTS ...
==
That said, some of the new chinese units might finally be breaking out of this mold. I don't have one of the new RH25 v2s yet ... but I am hearing good things about them from several quarters.
As to comparing them to the VoodooS
I'd definitely rather have a voodooS if my life depended on it ... but I could have 3 RH25s for the same price ... Now the VoodooS is fully collimated (has same BAE core I know and love) so any gun I put it on with close matching scope mount (1.5 ish ) its dead on ... like the UTCx and the new M
If you want the best clipon we can (easily) buy that's the M
its essentially the gen2 utc.
And if you want the best head mountable clipon we can easily buy that's the S ...
==
If you want to go with Chinese, then try the RH25 v2 ... you will have to manually collimate it, but if you get it solidly collimated and use the same center mounts on all the guns you use it on and mount it carefully, then you should be fine for hunting accuracy.
==
THAT SAID.
I think for shooting critters inside 300yds ... a TWS gives you more bang for the buck than a clipon. You get the magnification on the front end of the unit vs with a clipon you are zooming in on the TV screen on the back end of the unit. So dollar for dollar with TWS will beat the thermal clipon inside 300yds for PID inside 500yds with bigger TWS units like Halo.
A clipon is a more complicated unit, due to the demagnification on the back end to make the net magnification 1 ... and due to adding some collimating abilities back there in some units. So a clipon costs more. So if I was primarily buying to hunt/critter control inside 300yds, I'd get a TWS, you can get a 640 TWS brand new for under $3k these days, a good bit less than the RH25 ... and the RH25 is a 1x unit, where as the TWS is a 2x or 3x unit.
==
And one more comment, the VoodDooS is the first unit I've ever touched that is a good helmet mounted scanner AND a good thermal clipon. So after 10 years, I finally got one !!!
