Olight Odin IR : Testing Budget IR under Night Vision

In today’s video, we test out the Odin IR to see how the IR performance does under night vision. Lets see how it does!

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The Odin IR is similar to the rest of the Olight Odin family in that it uses the same housing that we see on the Odin, Odin mini, and Odin turbo. The main difference in the Odin IR is that it offers both white light and IR light within the same light.

This is interesting as there are only a few lights that offer this same function in the same light. The white light has two modes, the first is the low mode at 200 lumens and then the high mode of 1000 lumens. The low mode has a run time of a little over 8 hours and the high mode lasts about 3 hours. The high mode does slowly step down in lumen over time from the 1000 lumen brightness.

Seeing the low mode lasting an entire shift or 8 hours shows this was more pointed toward duty use in its design.

The IR mode uses a 150mw light with a 850nm wavelength. Now, I don’t know nearly enough about IR or night vision to know if that is any good. But the stats compare to similar white light and IR lights on the market.

The Odin IR includes the same other items as all of the rest of the Odin family with the rechargeable battery cord, picatinny mount, and the touchpad.

We centered our testing around IR performance testing on our fairly low quality generation 1 night vision. Starting indoors, our night vision had trouble illuminating the area with no ambient light or IR light to light up the space. The night vision we have is equipped with an IR illuminator and that helped to bring the room back into view. We then tried the Odin IR and the room was brightened significantly more than the standard IR illuminator that we had on the headset.

Having the ability to aim the beam around the room meant I could more easily highlight closer objects if I needed to see a bit more clearly. Taking the same setup to an enclosed space in doors showed the Odin IR is pretty ridiculously bright, almost too much so. The IR light bounces off all the surfaces in tight quarters and some folks may find the IR illumination in those super tight areas to be a bit too much. Good news though, as it’s just on a light, it’s easy for you to redirect the beam so you don’t add to much light to what you’re trying to look at.

One of the first things I keyed in on though is that the cone of light from the Odin IR is more of a flood than a directed beam of light like we see on other illuminators and laser combos. I wanted to see how it performed so we took the whole setup outside. The built in IR illuminator did exactly nothing outside. The weak little food light on the night vision unit really only lit up the ground and did nothing to improve our view when outside.

Swapping to the Odin IR, there was a greatly improved ability to see objects further in the distance. Again, the light was much brighter and the cone was more of a flood instead of an ultra-condensed beam in the center. I found I could see those objects that were a mess of colors and could easily make out the bushes and trees that were previously impossible to distinguish.
Hopefully, our tests of the Odin IR helped you in your purchasing decisions.

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Music by: @Barren Gates ​

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