The Thermal Monocular that made us love Thermal Monoculars again - TOPDON TS004
Torqued Magazine is an online publication “Dedicated to action lifestyle.” They cover automotive subjects, outdoor, electronics, firearms, and more. They recently reviewed TOPDON’s TS004, and came away with a whole new appreciation for thermal monoculars. Read on for their view of TOPDON’s smash-hit tool for outdoor enthusiasts.
Lets go back in time for a minute. We’ve had the great opportunity to test many Thermal Cameras, scopes and monoculars over the years. We’ve had some that were great, others not so much. One that stood out, we tested in the early spring a few years back. Let me just preface by saying it gets cold here in Utah. We decided to take that unit out in early April. It was a brisk 25-30 F degree night. That unit would not even power on. We thought maybe we broke it, maybe our batteries were dead. We had to return back to the office the next day to check things out. In the office, the unit worked fine, batteries were at 70%. We decided to put the batteries in the refrigerator for a few hours and then put them immediately into the test unit. It worked fine. Then we put the unit in the refrigerator without the batteries. We pulled it out 35 minutes later put the batteries in and it would not power up.
We were shocked. This was an IPX-6 rated unit, and it would not work in the cold. Most hunting here in Utah is done in temperatures way below what we were testing this unit at. It had removable CR123 batteries, which it ate through faster than my dog eats its bowl of chicken. Was it a great unit when it worked? Yes, yes it was. But the price of the batteries and the need to replace them at least twice in a 1 hour workload and it’s inability to work in the cold turned us off. Shoot, it turned us off on thermal monoculars for a while.
That has finally changed, We got our hands on the Top Don TS004 about 2 months ago. And in that 2 months it changed all the feels we’ve had towards thermal monoculars. The TSOO4 is everything we wanted from from other units. It’s given us hope, it’s given us joy, and it’s given fantastic results.