Powerful flashlights are great tools for bringing illumination when exploring the backcountry at night. Problem is, using flashlights to observe wildlife in the dark will almost always scare them away. Night vision goggles, such as the new Yashica Explorer, should make for better tools in these situations.
Touted to transform darkness into “vibrant, full-color landscape,” the night vision goggles can provide full-color visuals in low-light situations, while enabling black and white imagery in pitch black darkness. No need to switch on a flashlight to see what’s happening, this thing lets you observe nature in its full glory without creating any disturbance.
The Yashica Explorer night vision goggles can be used handheld similar to binoculars, although it also offers a helmet mount for hands-free vision in dark environments. It gets a circular OLED screen on each eyepiece, allowing you to see images with excellent brightness and contrast, although there’s also a 2.4-inch flip-up screen on the body if you want to see the same scene with a different framing. They pair those screens with a F/1.0 aperture lens, which should ensure maximum light intake, allowing it to make the most of any low-light situation. Additionally, the lens gets eight different coatings to minimize reflections, eliminate glare, enhance contrast, keep out dust, and more.
What really drives its night vision prowess, though, is the AI-powered image signal processor, which enhances any feint light collected from the scene to produce full-color images that accurately resemble daytime visibility. According to the outfit, it can produce color images at lux ratings as low as 0.0019, eliminating the need to put up with the green-tinted images of traditional night vision systems. If the lux ratings are lower than that, it switches to the three-level IR illuminator, which shows black and white display that, truth be told, still looks better than those green tint visuals.
The Yashica Explorer has a fixed 3x optical zoom, providing just enough magnification for many observation tasks, although it also adds 8x digital zoom in case you want to observe items from just a little further. Beyond allowing you to observe what’s happening in the dark, the device allows you to capture 4K videos and 48MP photos, so you can record everything you observe to a loaded microSD card (it supports up to 512GB).
It runs on a 3,500mAh battery, which can keep it running for up to 11 hours in low-light mode (the IR isn’t running). The battery is hot-swappable, too, so you can carry spares if you want to keep recording continuously. According to the outfit, charging the battery back to full takes 4.5 hours. Other features include a 1/2.9-inch Galaxycore CMOS sensor, five levels of brightness control, 13-degrees field of view, and a total weight of 430 grams, so this is pretty hefty. Do note, no helmet mount or microSD card are included in the package, so you’ll have to get those separately.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Yashica Explorer. Pledges to reserve a unit start at $249.
