Review: Pulsar Thermion Duo DXP50 thermal & daylight rifle scope

Pulsar’s Thermion Duo DXP50 multispectral rifle scope combines thermal imaging and 4K colour digital imaging into an electronic optic that’s good for day and night shooting — and is both fully featured and simple to use.

It continues the trend of building digital scopes with a ‘familiar’ rifle-scope design — a tube, lens bells at either end and turrets in between. The Pulsar’s layout is the result of sensible refinement of the concept, with a very good control setup.

This video shows some of the footage captured during the test of the Pulsar Thermion Duo

This enables you to almost intuitively get the best out of the scope, easily accessing and navigating through the menus, focussing the thermal image, capturing photos and videos, and more.

The thermal image is captured through the main objective lens, a 50mm F1.0 optic which has its focussing mechanism adjusted by little levers on either side. It’s very simple to reach forward and fine-tune the focus while looking through the scope.

On the other hand, the daytime image doesn’t require focussing. It is captured through a much smaller lens on top of the main lens. While the thermal lens has a flip-off cover, the daylight one is protected by a tiny pair of sliding shutters operated by a little switch on top.

The on/off and sleep button is mounted in the back of the daytime lens housing. It takes only about five seconds for the unit to switch on and show an image.

Pulsar Thermion Duo DXP50 multispectral rifle scope review — This thermal can can be used in daylight with its 4K colour lens. It’s also tough: note the dried mud after a hard hunt

There are three rubberised buttons on top of the rear of the scope, arranged like three slices from a round pie. You know exactly where each one is: at rear, you’ll find the selector for thermal, daylight and picture-in-picture; photo and video control in at the front right; zoom at front left. Easy as, er, pie.

The final control is mounted in the left turret: a button and wheel to access and move through the quick menu and the full menu. I won’t describe them in detail; suffice to say it all makes sense and if you’re not familiar with thermals generally or Pulsar specifically, it doesn’t take much to relearn it.

The right turret is the charging port and the top turret holds a battery.

Pulsar puts it colour pallets into the main menu, which means it takes a few seconds longer to access the choices, but once you’re there you can scroll through and see instantly what each looks like, then make you choice. People argue which is better but both have their advantages and the Thermion’s setup is a good one that I liked more and more as I used it. Once you decide you want to check out other pallettes, you take a few moments to get in there and then very quickly find the best one and select it. Ultimately, it’s quicker than clicking a button time after time to sus out the effect of other colours, all without the ability to jump back and forth between them.

The thermal image is on par with other good units in this price range. I had no trouble separating which hot signals were my sheep, which were roos, which were foxes and which were pigs. The clarity isn’t so good that every identification happens instantly but I never lost an opportunity.

You can of course fine tune the image’s brightness and contrast, as well as dialling the amplification and smoothing to suit conditions.

The digital daytime image, captured in 4K resolution, is also a good one, though not as clear or well defined as when you’re looking through nothing but glass lenses. As light fades, the digital colour images goes into black-and-white mode until eventually you’ll need to switch to thermal, achieved with a quick button press.

It has up to 16x digital zoom and I’d describe the magnified image as grainy rather than pixellated — there’s decent clarity that allows target identification at longer ranges and I’d have been comfortable taking aim at goats more than twice as far as the 350 Legend could shoot.

The thermal zoom also goes to 16x but with the smaller sensor it gets rather pixellated at the high end.

The DXP50 has a fantastic array of reticles, including crosses, circles, mil-dots, BDC and more — some of them traditional hunting crosshairs. A few are scalable, much like in a first focal plane reticle. You’ll find some you’ll like. I favoured the little cross for thermal shooting, which I inevitably did within point blank range, and a BDC crosshair for daylight.

The BDC reticle was handy for slightly longer shots mainly because I fit all thermal scopes to my 350 Legend for testing. It’s a 200m rifle at most but its low recoil means I never lose sight of my target through the scope. It also reduces the chances of clobbering myself with the eyepiece when dealing with the shorter eye relief provided by all scopes like this. The Thermion has 50mm of eye relief.

When it comes to handling recoil, the the Pulsar is stauncher than me. It is built to handle .375 H&H recoil, so it’s tough. I had it soaked by rain and covered in mud on a sub-zero night without any ill effects. The rubbers, seals and overall construction are highly protective and strong, so I can’t see any risk of hard use shortening its life.

The dual battery setup is great. One is built-in, the other removable, and both are rechargeable. The unit runs on power from the removable battery until it is depleted, then switches automatically to the inbuilt battery. You can change the removable battery without having to shut down the scope.

Battery life is reasonably good. I could drain them within only a few hours when using them heavily by capturing lots of video and mucking around with settings, but in lighter use you’ll get most of a night out of the two, and if you carry extra batteries or plug in a remote power source, you won’t have to stop.

Other features I appreciated were the option of recording of audio with video, the freeze-frame zeroing system, and the fact you can set up five different zero profiles, each with 10 distances to allow for the trajectory of your ammo.

The Thermion Duo has 16GB of built-in memory and Pulsar gives you 16GB of cloud storage, too. Access this by using the associated Stream Vision 2 app, which will also let you access and control the scope itself.

Multispectral scopes like the Thermion Duo aren’t replacements for your favourite regular daytime rifle scope because none of them have anything like the same image quality.

However, on a practical level they take your shooting options to another level where it doesn’t matter whether the sun is up or down, you can still hunt.

In the Pulsar’s case, the daytime image quality is perfectly adequate for hunting and pest control, and it’s very good at night with the thermal imaging. It has all the features you might want, short of a rangefinder, and the simple controls are well designed, well laid out and both quick and easy to use.

In short, it’s about the most versatile kind of scope you can get, with good performance and intuitive functionality.