Update of my previous review of december 22nd - Flir Systems Breach PTQ136 Multi-Functional Thermal Imaging Monocular / FLIR Boson - 320x256, 60Hz Core

This is an update to my previous rating of only 1 star. Over the last few days I've determined the following: 1) all of the problems detailed in my original review seem to have been caused by subpar battery charge or quality, 2) the Breach seems to be very sensitive to the battery used. The first battery I was using when first experiencing problems was the battery that came with my Breach so, I don't know if it was an old battery or just the brand. I tried some rechargeable batteries with my Breach but had problems with them also. My external battery from TNVC came with a USB spacer to make it easier to attach the power cord but I learned that with the spacer attached, it was not actually suppling any power to the Breach. Once I removed the spacer and plugged the cable in directly to the battery, I got power and all was fine. After having problems with numerous CR123A batteries (which is why I thought the Breach itself was the problem) I pulled out a recently purchased Streamlight brand CR123A and tried it. Since putting in the Streamlight brand battery, I have not had any problems with random shut downs or flashing orange screen and fail to boot. I have still had a couple times when I got a pixelated screen and even pushing the up and down buttons at the same time to cause a manual NUC, it still left some vertical pixel lines on the screen, these were fixed by turning off and turning back on the Breach. I now think this was caused by taking my Breach from the warm house into the cold air where there was too much of a temp change for it to accommodate. The manual states, "As the camera changes temperature, its pixels may drift due to internal and external temperature change. The pixels do not drift uniformly. The camera software compensates for the drift up to an accurate position point." However when this doesn't happen, "Push the two control buttons ▲ and ▼ at the same time to manually trigger a User-Controlled Manual Non-Uniformity Correction/Flat-Field Correction." So I think the lesson for me here is that an expensive, complex piece of equipment is extremely sensitive to battery type and quality so you should use the more expensive, higher quality, batteries for best performance. I' still only giving the Breach 4 stars though because I have yet to get any feedback from FLIR support (but heard back immediately from both DVOR and Optics Planet, thank you!). I think FLIR should add more details to their website or manually explain what can happen if old, not so high quality batteries are not used, i.e., random shut-downs, and orange flash screen with failing to startup, etc. I hope this part of my review helps someone if they happen to experience the problems I was having and use fresh, high quality batteries from the start like I failed to do. And hopefully this will help someone avoid the days of frustration trying to figure out why the thing was not working correctly. So, I can proudly state now (since I put in a decent battery) that the Breach does perform better than expected as to the picture quality and distance where you can detect animals in wooded areas that I cannot see even using my PVS-14s. One last small complaint; my fingers are sore from trying to push the buttons to select different settings. But I have found that there is a trick to pressing the buttons just so to get them to work.