Now Funding: ACPOTEL Night Vision binoculars

Binoculars are a handy little piece of kit to have around, whether you’re trying to see what that noise was down the street, or what exactly is going on up that tree down the path a bit. Traditional binoculars rely on light coming into the optics, which means once it’s dark, you can’t see a thing. Unless you’ve got some fancy night-vision gear, in which you can see things in lurid green. That is, unless you’ve got a pair of ACPOTEL Night Vision binoculars.

Packaging-wise, the ACPOTEL Night Vision binoculars are obviously a bit higher-tech than your standard pair of glass optics ones (such as these). While you’ve got glass optics pulling in the light (or gathering the light from the infrared emitters), it’s going through the type of sensor that we’re more used to seeing on a digital camera.

This also then means rather than seeing the image “live” through the optics, you’ve actually got a LCD screen that your eyes are looking at. In terms of the image quality, the ACPOTEL Night Vision binoculars can record 720p video at 40fps, or snap a photo of what you’re seeing at 1.3MP. So, not something that will replace your camera (or even your phone) for casual photos and videos, no.

Then again, that’s not the selling point for the ACPOTEL Night Vision binoculars. No, that goes to the night vision capabilities here, which should allow you to see what’s rustling off in the underbrush near your campsight, and be able to do so all night if you need to (well, until you exhaust the 8-hour battery life of the rechargeable cell). It’s an interesting configuration, though my concern would be the robustness of the case for hard use in the out of doors.

Earlybird pricing for the ACPOTEL Night Vision binoculars starts at $189, which is pricey compared to inexpensive (but still good) traditional binoculars, but does seem to pack in a lot of tech that’ll help you see what’s going bump in the night. And the fact that you can still use both eyes (and not be stuck in a monocular mode) to see in the dark is a big bonus in our book. acpotels.com / kickstarter.com