DVX Night Storm X1 Night Vision Review

You could mistake the new DVX Night Storm X1 night-vision viewer for a toy. It has the plasticky feel and clunky ergonomics of a box-store gadget – think early Atari gaming consoles. But that assessment misses some key features that makes this brand-new, very appealingly priced viewer a solid entry-level night-vision unit.

Readers who have been intrigued by the capabilities of night-vision, but put off by the stratospheric price of these electronics, can take comfort in the DVX Night Storm X1’s retail price of $299. Even better is that smart shoppers should be able to find it at about half that price once it begins production – the company is currently soliciting interest before it begins full production and distribution in March.

This is not a battle-hardened unit like the helmet-mounted nods that cost north of $4,000. Instead, it’s a somewhat flimsy,  hand-held consumer-grade viewer that does an adequate job of revealing the world at night. If that interests you, here’s a look at its capabilities and value.

• Records 4K video at 30 fps
• 52 megapixel images
• 18 hour batter life
• Picture-in-picture mode
• Built-in IR illuminator
• 8x digital zoom
• Water resistant (IP67)
• Two-year warranty
• MSRP: $299 ($150 on KickStarter pre-order)

How the DVX Night Storm X1 Works

A video captured at night by the author.

Before wading into the merits and shortcomings of the Night Storm, a word about night vision. Fundamentally, it’s not thermal. This remains one of the biggest misconceptions about the category. Both are optimized for night-time viewing, but while thermals convert temperature variations into images, requiring no light to deliver spectral videos of warm-blooded hogs and coyotes, night-vision amplifies small amounts of ambient light to see details in dark situations. And when there’s no light at all, most units — the Night Storm X1 among them — use an on-board infrared illuminator to boost visibility.

Think of illuminators as fancy flashlights, but they use a wavelength of light that’s not easily visible to animals or humans, which means they can be used more or less without detection. Night-vision units deliver more detail, revealing human faces, dimensions, and textures of objects that thermals can’t detect.

Read Next: Best Thermal Monoculars and Binoculars

The DVX Night Storm X1 has a decent 850-nanometer illuminator. The company claims an infrared range of 1,200 meters, but I was able to get about half that distance in my field testing of a prototype version of the device. The 850nm wavelength is standard for the category, but it emits a pinkish hue that is detectable to some animals. I had both deer and coyotes flare in my testing of the infrared illumination, but they didn’t vacate out of alarm. Rather, they stirred and watched alertly, not unlike how animals react under a high-intensity spotlight.

In some situations, under strong moonlight or streetlights, for instance, you don’t need the IR illuminator to get a fairly resolved image, but the standard image degrades with darkness and distance, so any serious nighttime viewing is done using the IR mode.

The heart of the DVX Night Storm X1 is its CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) sensor that delivers decent images to its very good viewfinder. While DVX calls the device a “binocular,” it’s really a monocular with two lenses, if you can wrap your head around that concept. One lens emits the IR illumination beam and contains the CMOS sensor. The other lens focuses the image for the oversized digital viewfinder.

Unlike most night-vision units, which have eyepieces containing a small digital display, the Night Storm X1 has a large screen inside its plastic housing that users view at an arm’s length. In this way, it’s a little like a sideways cell phone embedded in the device. The 3-inch liquid-crystal display with 360×640-pixel resolution provides decently sharp and vibrant images and displays the menu, which includes commands for screen brightness, Wi-Fi connectivity, date and time stamp, picture-in-picture mode, image resolution, output frequency, and navigation in any of nine languages.

The Night Storm connects to the Viidure mobile app, a client software for driving video recorders, dashcams, and other devices. It allows a user to remotely fire the Night Storm and to capture and then share photos and videos from the unit. The unit itself has on-board Wi-Fi that connects to the mobile-phone app. The Night Storm records data to a micro SD card, which can also be manually downloaded to a device.

Read Next: Best Night Vision Goggles

Testing the DVX Night Storm X1 in the Field

Because I wasn’t using the Night Storm X1 with a weapon-mounted viewer, I didn’t use the unit in hunting scenarios, but I took it out on sub-zero Montana evenings to test its capabilities in general observation situations. As a short- to mid-range surveillance device, it’s a decent viewer, though the amount of visual “noise” in very dark situations degrades details. Resolution gets noticeably worse with magnification.

Users can toggle between combinations of IR and regular modes. With four levels of IR intensity available, users can easily adjust the amount of additional illumination for various situations. The farther the target, the more powerful and focused the IR illumination, but I never got images anywhere close to as focused and robust as those advertised by the company in its promotional materials. The images I captured were smudgy, smoky, and monochromatic, though with enough detail that I could tell, out to about 600 yards, a buck mule deer from a doe, or a yearling Angus from an adult cow. Not bad in full darkness with light snow in the sub-zero air.

What the Night Strom X1 Does Best

While the oversized viewfinder is great for viewing and transmitting images, I found that even with eight intensity levels, it was always a bit too bright and that brightness degraded my night-vision when I turned my gaze away from the unit. A nice touch: there’s a dedicated button for lighting up the controls, which helps with zero-light operation.

Another nice touch is an on-board flashlight — DVX calls it a “tactical light” — that can be run in either steady or flashing modes. It’s a useful feature that I used regularly to see my way to my viewing locations and also to find a lost lens cap in the dark.

Where the DVX Night Storm X1 Can Improve

The company claims the rechargeable internal battery has a run time of 18 hours of continuous use, with the power-hungry IR feature switched off. In the cold night of eastern Montana, I got noticeably less out of the battery, but it still can run for a whole night without needing a charge.

After an evening of posting up for coyotes, I found that I couldn’t record images or videos to the micro SD card, which had inadvertently popped out of its slot on the side of the unit. Worse, I had to reformat the card, which meant I erased all the content I had recorded before the mishap. I’d like to see the SD card cover redesigned in production versions to fix this easily avoidable handling problem.

Navigating the unit is a little frustrating. The video and photo controls are shared with the “OK” button, used to select various menu modes. I’d like to see a dedicated image-capture button and maybe a different arrangement than the four equally sized buttons around the main power button. Speaking of the photo mode, the unit captures images in five different resolution levels, including a super-detailed 52-megapixel level. It also captures video in true 4K resolution (9600×5400), high enough that users can tease out details and boost contrast and clarity with post-production software.

I struggled mightily with the ergonomics of the Night Storm. Its chassis is a too-slick plastic that gets downright slippery in cold weather. The oversized operation buttons are a nice touch, and fairly easy to use with gloves, but I wish they had distinctive texturing so that I could feel them in the dark. The focus knob on the left-side lens is hard to turn with gloves, as it’s located so close to the IR lens. This focus control became noticeably looser and less precise as I used the unit, a problem I attribute to the prototype design.

But my main gripe is the awkward shape and balance of the unit. It handles like a subway sandwich. The indistinct pebbling on its shoulders doesn’t help with gripping the device, which is so light and insubstantial that it doesn’t settle easily in the hand. Thankfully, the Night Storm has a tripod mount on its belly, and operating the unit from a tripod is a handy hack, especially when deploying the upper limit of its 8X magnification. I generally ran the unit under 3X in order to get the best image resolution.

Final Thoughts on the DVX Night Storm X1

Those ergonomic quibbles aside, there’s a lot of capability in this unit, and it’s hard to imagine how DVX plans to sell it for such a crazy-low price. Given its Wi-Fi connectivity, its five resolutions of image capture, its very capable IR illuminator and sensor, and its excellent display, it’s astonishing that it’s available for the price of a discounted standard digital camera.

You may be disappointed in the flimsy build, and I hope DVX improves its durability in production models, especially since it will be used at night, when instruments bump, fall, and suffer abuses that they might not face in the daylight. But DVX offers a two-year warranty with the Night Storm X1, which should provide buyers with service after the sale.

Overall, there’s a lot to recommend the DVX Night Storm X1. While not exactly plug-and-play, it’s fairly easy to use without hours of instruction. It has fair to very good IR-enabled night-vision capability. And its mobile app makes sharing images with friends a cinch.

It’s an excellent freshman effort from a new brand in the night-vision space. DVX has built night-vision units for other companies in the past, but this is its first branded product, and it’s a winner, whether the Night Storm X1 is your first night-vision viewer or you’re an old hand at the nighttime observation game.