Lens guide
This page serves as a guide to help users distinguish lens manufacturers. There may be small errors i've made, so please take this with a grain of salt.
- FUJINON/NOCTIS
- QIOPTIQ
- EDMUND(Edmund Optics)
- RPO(Rochester Precision Optics)
- Argus
- Optronics Enginnering(OE)
Noctis/fujinon lens is the golden standard of milspec lenses. You can follow the steps from image above to distinguish. There are two versions of fujinon coatings, one is purple and the other is deep light blue/mint(ish) color. Most of the new 1XEP3 fujinon lens will have deep purple coating. Those mint/light blue coated fujinon lenses are mainly found with L3's 27777 cage code.
Qioptiq lens is the OG carson lens, you'll encounter a lot of these lenses from surplus PVS-14s, especially ITT ones. These lenses have pretty weak plastic knurling. I'd suggest you not to drop these on the floor lol.
Edmund lens is one of the rarest PVS-14 Lens variants. It was discountinued some time in 2010s. Their coating color is beautiful. Compared to fujinon or qioptiq lens, which has single color coating, you'll find the edmund lens to have multiple color coating. Honestly its hard to describe XD.
RPO lens has some differences from other PVS-14 Milspec lenses(#1 ~ #3). The material of this lens is polymer, hence the weight is very light. These lenses also have a downside of having big lens flaring while looking at bright light source such as street lamps. There are 3x versions of these lenses(3.5x to be specific), RPO2.0(Discontinued), RPO3.0(Discontinued), RPO 4.0 V1(Discontinued), and RPO 4.0 V2(For sale, yay). Keep in mind that RPO 3.0 objective lens is identical to RPO 4.0 objective lens. Its the eyepiece that has changed.
Optronics, so called "OE" is made in israel. These lenses are at the worse side of milspec lenses. Objectively, they dont suck, but compared to other US Milspec lenses, theyre just worse. Its not unusable, just worse. It'll still be better than most of the chinese lenses. Its easy to distinguish OE V1 and OE V2 as they have coating or no coating.
Now its time for our lovely Argus lenses. Its the same company that makes BNVD 1431 and the well-known PNVG clone APNVG. These lenses are basically their PVS-31A/APNVG lens housed into a PVS-14 Lens cell. If you tried APNVG or their PVS-31 before, these lenses will have the same performance. These are surprisingly lightest PVS-14 Lens in the market! Their weight is at an impressive 76.6g, when RPO 4.0 lens weighs at 80.7g. If you want extreme lightweight, this is your best choice.
