After soliciting opinions here and weighing all the options, I decided to "put my toe in the water" and purchase a Yukon "Ranger" Digital Night Vision. http://www.opticsplanet.net/yukon-di...ger-28041.html For $399, I'm impressed. Now I've never owned a pair of NVGs (night-vision glasses), but having worked on the FLIR back in 1989, I know a little about what is a good image picture compared to what isn't. The clairity of the picture is very good. From 30 feet away, in complete darkness I could make out perfectly the "FORD" lable on my Excursion. I took it out to the backyard where the dog is and I could easily follow her around the yard with exceptional detail. Of interest is that when she looked straight at the NVGs, the Infra-red light shone quite nicely off the back of her retina. Thus, if you use these for hunting varminents like coyotes if they look at you they are giving themselves away. The unit came with power cord so you can use the 12V battery of your car if you wish to just sit in your car and observe or you can use an AC adapter. Normally though you'll be walking around using the 6 AA batteries. You can also capture your images straight to a monitor or hand-held video camera so you can upload to the net. The review at Opticsplanet claims that this unit rivals the clarity of 2nd Gen NV. Well not having served in the military I haven't had access to either Gen 2 or 3, but I can say that the clairity is exceptional. Also, because this is "Digital" it lacks the "fishbowl" affect that some on this board warned me about that is present in standard NVG. The picture in this unit is black-and-white and nice and flat. I have read that in a quarter-moon one can see coyotes 300 yards away. I cannot attest to it given that the moon wasn't out when I tested it tonight, but I will update the review with various phases of the moon. Finally, this unit apparently uses IR emmissions in a wavelength that most NV units don't, thus most detectors out there may fail to find you (a common drawback with IR units since their inception). For $399 I don't think you can go wrong.