Review: Pard Night Stalker Mini night-vision scope

This Pard is called the Night Stalker Mini for obvious reasons — it’s tiny — but this night-vision IR rifle scope is small on another important count: its price of just $600.

You’ll struggle to find a good night-vision scope that matches the price, short of buying some no-name device on the internet with suspect quality and backup. 

The Night Stalker Mini is one of the growing number of digital scopes that mimics the shape and style of a traditional rifle scope, eschewing the boxy style of the originals. That makes packaging everything inside it a bit more challenging, but Pard has excelled in getting all the basics into something that is only 30cm long, has virtually no objective bell, and weighs a meagre 455g with its 18650 battery fitted.  

It looks a lot like a typical 1-6x daytime scope, which is an apt comparison, as we’ll see in a moment. 

It shares its diminutive body with the Pard Pantera 256 Q thermal scope, which we’ve reviewed in another post and video. I won’t go into an analysis here of why you might want one over the other other than to say this night-vision scope is half the price of its thermal stablemate. 

The Mini is actually better described as a day/night scope because it can be used in the light and the dark, with its infrared sensor coming into play when the sun goes down and a regular sensor providing a full colour image to you when the sun’s up. So it’s a versatile little thing.

However, it’s true that if you don’t shoot at night, the nature of digital scope means you’re better off just using a regular day time optic, but why settle for that when this lets you keep hunting at some of the best times for finding animals? 

Pard has fitted the Mini with a 2560×1440 pixel CMOS sensor, ensuring a high-resolution image. There are bigger ones available in bigger models, but this one gives you excellent clarity anyway. 

You’ll see a bunch of images here, taken day and night with the Pard, but there are two important differences with what you see through the scope.

First, the quality shown to your eye is better. The videos recorded by the Mini are 1440×1080 pixels, and the photos slightly bigger despite what the official specs say. Yet even though the Pard’s internal viewing screen is only 800×800 pixels, you see a much brighter, smoother and clearer image. 

Second, the image you see in the scope is round, just like your daytime scope. That makes perfect sense to me and is aesthetically pleasing, but there’s a more valid reason to like it: because the display cuts out the corners of the original oblong image, the target fills more of the screen than it otherwise would. 

In daylight, the colour image is quite clear enough to hunt with confidence. Deep shadows are more challenging than with a regular scope, and the digital image will never be as sharp as an analogue one, but it’s pretty good all the same. 

There are six brightness settings, too, to fine-tune it with. Using the menu options, you can also select to see a black and white image, a yellow-tone image or a green-tone image. 

The colour setting will work at night too, but if you add a flashlight throwing visible colour like white, red or green.

But for the best result when darkness comes, press the mode button above the diopter housing to switch the Pard to black-and-white mode at half the frame rate (30Hz versus 60Hz). In this mode it is more sensitive to whatever ambient remains. It’ll also pick up infrared light and convert it to visible light for you. 

If you go into the menu you’ll find you can also opt for green-tone or yellow-tone settings. They work just like black and white, only tinged, and if you prefer one them, go for it.  

Whatever you select, if there’s not enough ambient light, you’ll see nothing. Apart from the fact that the small 25mm objective lens can only let in a limited amount of light, almost all night-vision devices rely on a supplementary light source most of the time. In other words, you need an torch, and an infrared one is the obvious choice because it’s not visible to animals, but white, red or green will also do the trick.   

The amount and quality of light will dictate how easily you see targets at night, and how far away. The key determinant is how much the target contrasts with the background. In very similar conditions with long winter grasses all around, I found roos were not always easy to see at a glance but pigs stood out like the dog’s proverbials. Most animals’ eyes will glow under IR, which helps. 

And as long as the target stood out well enough, identification was easy, which is one of the best things about using night-vision instead of thermals. Many people like a thermal spotter to find thing and a night-vision scope to identify and shoot with. 

The torch I used was one of Pard’s, the TL3-850, which is a clever little thing. It not only adjusts from floodlight to pencil beam, but you can adjust the aim of the beam by loosening the lock ring and tweaking the direction the lens faces. This is perfect if you mount does quite line up with the scope.  

This TL3 shine IR light in the 850nm wavelength, the one considered best for hunting because of its longer reach — a claimed 350m in this case from the 5W Pard, although you really need a bigger scope than the Mini to take best advantage of that range. I could certainly see that far with it but animals were hard to pick unless they really contrasted with the surroundings. 

All the same, it suited the Mini perfectly, especially as it is also very small. It runs the same 18650 battery, too. 

Bigger, more powerful lights will extend the visible range, but whatever you choose, it will add to the cost of the setup, something to keep in mind when making your own price comparisons against scopes that come with a torch built in. 

You’ll have no trouble mounting the torch to the Mini, because the Pard scope comes with a great set of ring mounts that also have an extra top ring complete with a pic-rail extension. The TL3 light comes with clamp. 

The rings are excellent. They weigh just 56g each, and clamp the scope’s 30mm tube using four screws with grip tape to add a secure hold. There’s a recoil lug screwed into one of them that can be removed if you’re fitting it to a flat-topped surface instead of a typical toothed rail. The two-screw clamps are sprung for easier removal and attachment. They’re high mounts, which won’t suit every rifle, but they’re certainly good.

But back to the Night Stalker Mini itself. 

The top turret rotates to zoom in and out on your target. The scope’s base optical magnification is 3x and the digital zoom will double that in four increments: 3.8x, 4.5x, 5.2x and 6.0x. There’s an increase in pixelation over that range but it’s not too bad at all. 

Press the top turret and you open the menu: a quick press to get a short menu of basic items and a long press to open the full and comprehensive list of functions. I won’t detail them all here because they’re easy to look up, but suffice to say the Mini not short of features. 

One of the important ones, though, is the zeroing function, which is a straightforward process. You can set up to five zero profiles to allow for different firearms or different loads of ammo. While you’re at it, you can select any one of six reticles in any of four colours. There’s no ballistic system in it, though.

The buttons on top of the diopter housing control colour modes, as I said earlier, as well as photos, video, wi-fi and stepping back through the menu. 

Using the Pard Vision 2 app and wi-fi, you can access all of this, download images and watch the live action on the screen on your smartphone or tablet. 

Focus is handled by rotating the left turret, with a focus range from even less than the 5m claimed to well beyond the horizon. 

To get the screen to focus for your eye via the diopter adjustment, you can wind and wind for miles as it goes from -5 to +3. The adjuster will extend the scope’s length by 42mm. However, if you’re worried that will eat into the very generous eye relief of 100mm, don’t be. You can see this screen’s picture clearly at arm’s length, and the eye relief figure represents the distance from the back of the eye piece, whether or not you might have wound it out 42mm.

So here’s a tip: set up the diopter before you mount the scope or you’ll toss away all that wonderful eye relief and risk being head butted on recoil. Don’t ask me how I learned this. 

The Mini’s 3.7V 3200mAh rechargeable battery battery lasted me a predictable 4-5 hours in the field and if that wasn’t enough I would swap it for a spare I carried. One battery is supplied with the scope, and it can be charged in the device or separately. 

If you want to capture photos and video, you’ll need to insert your own micro-SD card as there’s no built-in memory. This gives you the option of downloading images from the card as well as through the Vision 2 app. 

All in all, it’s terrific little scope. In size and price it very much resembles an entry-lever product, but you can’t complain about its performance. It’s so small it won’t overwhelm a rimfire or air rifle, but I used it out in the paddocks on a centrefire — day and night — with great success.   

Pard has done well to pack so much day/night aiming ability into this tiny package. 

SPECIFICATIONS

• Sensor: 2560×1440 pixels, 2.9 micron pixels, sensitivity of 0.001 lux
• Frame rate: 60hZ colour, 30Hz mono
• Display: 800×800 pixels, round
• Objective lens: 25mm
• Magnification: 3 x optical, plus 2x digital zoom
• Focus range: <5m to infinity
• Eye relief: 100m
• Field of view: 9.9m @ 100m (5.7°)
• Colour modes: Full colour, black and white, green, yellow
• Media resolution: video, 1440×1080; photo, 1356×1356
• Storage: Micro-SD card up to 128GB
• Battery: 1 x 18650 3.7V, rechargeable
• Run time: Up to 6 hours (4-5 usually)
• Dimensions: 295x82x70mm (L/W/H)
• Weight: 455g with battery
• RRP: $599
• Distributor: Australian Sporting Agencies