ELCAN DigitalHunter DayNight Digital Riflescope

DigitalHunter™ by ELCAN Optical Technologies: The world's first Digital Riflescope brings the power of modern electronics and software to the shooting sports.
Elcan DigitalHunter DayNight is a unique product: a Day / Night Digital Riflescope.

The DAYLIGHT mode provides the same excellent imagery for targeting during the day as Elcan DigitalHunter Digital Riflescope (Model #DH1). The LOW LIGHT mode provides stunning low light level performance. When used with a commonly available near-infrared illuminator (not included), Elcan DigitalHunter Day / Night Digital Riflescope displays black and white imagery of objects at night up to 65 yds away. Near-infrared illuminators - also called IR Flashlights - emit light that is invisible to humans and most animals.
Elcan DigitalHunter Day / Night Digital Rifle Scope is a lower-cost, good-resolution alternative to image intensifier or infrared rifles copes. And since Elcan DigitalHunter DayNight is a digital riflescope, it provides electronic ballistic compensation, automatic video and still image capture and replay, field selectable reticles, and customizable reticles.

Electronic ballistic compensation enables the shooter to "hold where you want to hit™"! Elcan DigitalHunter Digital Rifle Scope is a range compensating riflescope, removing one contributor (holdover estimate) from the shooting equation.

Additionally, Elcan digital riflescopes are not plagued with common telescope issues such as parallax, magnification change-induced boresight shifts and exit pupil diameter reduction, and limited eye relief.

The four field selectable reticles, when coupled with the four ballistic data tables, enable the scope to function as four different rifle scopes. The Elcan DigitalHunter Digital Riflescope can be setup for a centerfire rifle, a shotgun (great for turkey), a crossbow and a muzzleloader. Since the reticles are graphic images they can be any color, shape or size that can be drawn by the user via bitmap generating software...circles, lines, squares. Parallax is avoided since they aren't physical features of an image plane.

DigitalHunter DayNight joins DigitalHunter (Model #DH1) in ELCAN's digital riflescope product line.

Ray Sasser - About Elcan Digital Hunter Rifle Scope

There's a new rifle scope technology on the horizon, a spin-off from military developments made by the Raytheon Company. Traditional hunters and target shooters will not like the Elcan Digital Hunter rifle scope, a Star Wars-looking contraption that one shooting editor described as "butt ugly."

Techno-phobes will run the other way when they see a shooter on the firing line plug a USB cable into a laptop computer and load ballistics information into his rifle scope. Others will embrace the technology as they've done with each progressive step in an evolutionary chain that began with the Chinese invention of gunpowder.

I spent a chilly October morning on a firing line near Mabank being indoctrinated into the digital marksmanship era. My instructors were Jim Florence, chief engineer for Elcan, Rusty Mauldin, the company's sporting optics product manager, and manufacturer's representative Dave Brownfield. Elcan is a Raytheon subsidiary.

To make the demonstration complete, they brought two rifles. The rifles had scope-mounting rails already attached but the scopes were brand new – still in the box.

It took Florence about three minutes to mount a scope on a 30-06. He connected the digital scope to his laptop computer, called up a ballistic software package and entered the muzzle velocity and the ballistic coefficient of the Winchester ammo he was using.

The software calculated bullet drop at any range we might consider taking a shot, and the information was stored in a computer chip inside the scope. To remove as much human error as possible, Florence set the rifle on a shooting cradle called a Lead Sled. He bore-sighted by looking through the bore at a target 50 yards away.

It took me about four shots and corresponding adjustments to place a bullet in the center of that target. After that, all I had to do was tell the scope how far I was shooting, and it automatically adjusted the reticle to deliver a bullet dead-on at the desired range.

Adjustments are made, easily and quickly, through an LCD screen on top of the scope. It's similar to the screen on a digital camera, and it also serves as a playback screen for the video that's automatically triggered whenever a shot is fired.

Mauldin set up three-liter bottles of colored water at 100, 200, 300 and 400 yards and we shot the plastic bottles, replaying the dramatic explosion of water when the bullet struck.

"The video feature was designed as a means for a hunter to record his shot at a game animal and be able to instantly review where the bullet hit or whether the shot was a clean miss," Mauldin said. "The video has become a valuable instructional tool that has made digital scope shooters into better shots."

When I fired at the 400-yard bottle, we all saw something fly up on impact, but the bottle appeared intact. A review of the video indicated that the bullet knocked off the white bottle cap and left the bottle standing.

The Digital Hunter rifle scope comes with four different reticles (crosshair configurations) already programmed into the scope. A white reticle can be selected to stand out against dark backgrounds. If none of the standard reticles suits you, you can design your own.

Unlike other rifle scopes, the Digital Hunter is not a telescope. Zooming is done electronically, from 2.5X to 16.5X magnification. The electronic magnification is parallax free and the exit pupil remains constant, allowing easy target acquisition, even at high power.

The only two drawbacks I could find were price and weight. The digital scope weighs 26 ounces, nearly seven ounces heavier than Leupold's LPS 3.5x to 14x, my personal favorite traditional scope.

Mauldin said physically challenged hunters are particularly excited about the Digital Hunter. It can be used with a video monitoring screen so the rifle can be sighted without your eye to the scope. That's a huge advantage for a quadriplegic, one-armed or no-armed shooter.

To make certain its electronics will not interfere with nearby cellphones, cameras, computers or other electronics, the Digital Hunter is also the only rifle scope approved by the Federal Communications Commission.