In this demonstration vidieo, NPO uses its two different products to give a full understanding of how the night vision (image intensifier) and thermal imager work under darkness.
Learn more about our night vision device please refer to glimfinder. Traditional night vision is an enhanced eye, it can gether the very few photons in a space and letting them go through a tunnel device to amplify the effect by letting them colliding. It can let you see in the dark just like how you see in the day.
The thermal imager can “see” in a different sense. It actually only capture the heat signature, the image in any thermal scope is actually simulated. It helps you to understand the surrounding by showing you how different item emitt heat differently. It can show you an animal is dead or alive by temperature, but you cannot recoganize the visible patterns on the surface of an item, unless it behaive thermal differently. Also very importantly, the most typical thermal scope in hunting use are working at 8~14nm infrared wavelength, so you cannot use thermal scope to see things through a glass like night vision scope does. In another way to put this, night vision is a very strong human eye let you see, but thermal imager is a different eye can only let you feel. Night vision device must see things when there are still photons bouncing around in a space, but thermal scope is not “seeing” depanding on photons.
Another very important factor about these two defferent devices is frame rate, the night vision(image intensifier) scope works under very low delay, but the thermal scope works with a perceptible image delay because the image in a thermal scope is the product of simulation from heat signature to the patterns in the OLED display, through a very complicated image process, and this needs time to complete.