This is so cool! Thanks for your time and effort!
This is so cool! Thanks for your time and effort!
When Mr. White posted his original thread, I thought it should be a sticky, and still think that way. The original post is also well worthy of being made a sticky. Seeing the different sights in different lighting conditions is really helpful.
The age of some of the tritium sights is interesting. I have never had s set of tritium sights lasted more than about 5 years before I decided that replacement with new tritium sights was required.
The factory plastic Glock sight performed surprisingly well in Mr. White's original thread. This sight did not seem to perform as well here.
Great test, thank you for all the work involved. Best sight-light test I've seen.
One variable I'm curious about is the effect of High Pressure Sodium Streetlights. These are the yellowish lights I typically see in most urban areas at night, making it relevant for a CCW sight.
Curious what effect the yellow light would have on the effect of colored sights, as this style of light tends to wash out clothing colors.
I appreciate the kind words guys, glad it's helpful!
I agree, I think a light-colored insert could address the cases like #7 or #9 where the Trijicon DI falls well behind the Ameriglos...while the DI still wouldn't have the searing intensity of regular fiber optic sights in good light, with a bright insert you could make the claim that it is the most consistently visible across all lighting conditions. (Whether that outweighs all other considerations though would be another discussion.)Originally Posted by rd62
Good point. It also makes me wonder about POI if relying on the three tritium dots at night.
That's a real interesting question. I don't live in town, but I do have a large streetlight-type light out back over my driveway and garage. It is cooler though (in the 5500K range) and has a greenish tint, though not as green as the photos might lead you to believe. Headed out tonight and took a few more shots. Snow-covered ground, cloudy night, no visible moon.
(If a mod is able to copy-paste the section below into the original post so things are all in one place, that would be cool!)
#14 - Outdoors at night, 100' away from streetlight, dark background
#15 - Outdoors at night, 100' away from streetlight, light background
#16 - Outdoors at night, 50' away from streetlight, dark background
#17 - Outdoors at night, 50' away from streetlight, light background
While taken at the same distance as the previous shot, in this shot the streetlight is to the side, whereas on the previous shot it was behind me.
This seems to allow the fiber optic sights to pick up more light, and the green fiber optic sights become essentially equal to tritium.
My eyes did not perceive the red fiber to be nearly as bright as the photo shows though.
#18 - Outdoors at night, 15' away from streetlight, dark background
Now here's where things took an interesting turn. In all previous shots I've taken, I set the exposure in camera to match the scene as I perceived it, did not make any other changes in post processing, and felt the photo represented what I saw accurately (with the exception of not capturing the brilliance of the Dawson fiber optics). I mentioned regarding #17 that I perceived the red fiber to be dimmer than the photo showed, and in #18 and #19, the difference was even more pronounced. In these last couple shots, I perceived the red fiber to be barely visible, not glowing, and I found the lime green rings markedly more visible than the orange rings on the Ameriglos. The photo below has been altered to approximate my perception. Whether the difference is in human eye vs. camera sensor or my eye vs camera sensor, I don't know, but I wasn't going to wake up my family to get another opinion.
#18B - Same as above, altered to represent my perception
#19 - Outdoors at night, 15' away from streetlight, light background
Same consideration applies as #18 re: my perception vs. the camera.
Hot damn, solid reference material right here. Invaluable work, thank you greatly for such an illuminating (no pun intended) contribution.
Can this please be stickied?
“Conspiracy theories are just spoiler alerts these days.”
Great work man, thank you for doing that!
Really a helpful and interesting topic.
Very good post. Thank you.
May I ask how far the camera is from the the sights when taking the picture. I have done similar test in real life (with only a few of the sights you have) and my eyes see differently than the pics you provided. It could be my eyes though!
The camera was about 40 inches away...I used a longer focal length (300mm equiv) so the sights on the edge of the photo would still be seen relatively straight-on and then set the distance in order to fill the frame. As I chose to use featureless backgrounds, I wasn't really concerned about depth of field or telephoto compression.
Like I mentioned earlier, the major inconsistency I noticed between my eyes and the camera was the apparent brightness of green/yellow vs. red/orange. The other element I think can be pretty subjective is setting the exposure. If letting the camera do the metering, dark scenes would have come out much lighter -- though a similar effect can occur with our own eyes once adapted to the darkness. It would be interesting to hear in what way you saw things differently, and whether it was a matter of a certain sight looking different relative to the background or sights looking different relative to each other.
My experience was not as scientific as yours, I don't think. I had 3 Ameriglo night sights - yellow, red, white outline. I compared them in 3 or 4 types of environments - against a green foliage (trees), against normal neighborhood stuff like houses, in a shooting stall in an indoor range against white/manilla paper targets, and an outside range against white/manilla paper targets.
The yellow always looked washed out to me. It never looked like that NEON green/yellow that you see on road workers or safety equipment.
The red popped sometimes but in situations where the light was darker like a shooting bay, it looked much darker - especially if there was no direct light on it.
That left the white which seemed to pop in almost all situations pretty well. Sadly, I didn't have fiber optics sights, so maybe the fiber in the same colors may be different?
I don't remember the consensus of Mr. White's post, but I think I may have been in the minority preferring the white over the yellow or red. I guess my eyes are just different.
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