We recently had a viewer request to see gear under IR so we’ll start out by showing various plate carriers under night vision to see advantages to various colorways…and why it doesn’t matter.
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Plate Carriers Under Night Vision – the magical story of why you shouldn’t care
First, it’s important to remember and highlight how night vision sees color. Unlike the human eye, nightvision sees objects in varying shades of one single color. And the question of which colorway works best or which colors tend to “glow” more comes up often. But it’s a relatively silly conversation that seems to mean a whole lot…only when completely out of context.
So in order to test this out, we started by taking a look at all of our carriers during the daytime. We have our HRT RAC in Multicam, our Defense Mechanisms MEPC in Multicam tropic, the Agilite k19 in Multicam black, our Crye SPC in Multicam, along with the Javlin Concepts A-jac in Multicam, our LAPG low viz carrier in coyote, and we rounded out the test with a chest rig from Tracer Tactical in Moab.
Next, we took all the carriers and observed how they all looked under pvs14s with the daytime caps on. The results were as expected with the colorways disappearing almost completely and the Multicam, Multicam black, and tropic colorways looking almost identical.
The different hues of the varying dyes used seem to give the fabric a slightly different hue color and while folks seem to think this would give you away, that argument is a little weird. And that’s because when compared to the contrast of the mags, connectors, radios, ptts, and all the other nonsense, you stick out so much more due to the contrasting colors and the hue of the fabric means almost nothing.
But we kept going and used the IR illuminator on the 14s to highlight our gear and here the contrast between varying items became far more apparent. The different items all had a different hue to them and the variation in the hue was a far bigger problem than the overall brightness of the item.
We then took the plate carriers and placed them at distance. This test was interesting as the hue of the fabrics became far less apparent, but the carriers were extremely easy to spot, much like in the daytime. None of the carriers or colorway patterns really blended in at all.
So we added in our higher powered IR illuminator but that seemed to introduce new problems. We toned down the brightness and the cone of light and we found that sweet spot where we could see the plate carriers better when illuminated.
Interesting though, the hue of the carrier mattered very very little. Again, the contrast between all the items and bits was what gave the plate carrier away.
Every plate carrier, regardless of color pattern or hue, was extremely easy to see.
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Music by: @Barren Gates