I am probably one of the few people to have used both the older XQ38 the newer XQ35 and now the XG35. By “used” I mean taken it stalking 2-3 times a week for a period of at least 6 months, not just a YouTube back garden review or dogs at the local park.
LRF is a personal subjective thing so you either need it, have it on your binos or don’t need it. I won’t advise you either way.
The upgrade from the older XQ38 to the XQ35 is noticeable but I think allot of that is down to software rather than hardware. Obviously both will spot a heat spot at hundreds and hundreds of yards but it probably needs to be in the 200-300 yard bracket before you can id something as a deer. Beyond that it could be a horse, sheep, fox or a deer. I have been in situations where at those kind of ranges (in the conditions of the time) I couldn’t determine between a horse and a red deer or on another occasion a fox and a muntjac. Not confidently anyway. Obviously binos / animal movement worked it out at the time, but I am trying to give you an idea of performance in the real world. Allot of the online stuff is guys looking at their dogs in the garden from about 20 yards. Most thermals look pretty good at short range and the marketing guys take full advantage. The XG range is a different story really. You can in my opinion push that useful id range mentioned above range out to nearly 400 yards and sub 200 you can usually determine muntjac, roe or fallow etc from the body shape. Obviously size can usually do this as well but if you ignored that or were poor a judging distances the thermal performance is good enough. Sub 100 you are starting to get antler and velvet kind of detail on even the smaller deer. Another real world use for me is determining if that heat spot in the cover is a deer head or a pheasant, hare etc. With the older XQ38 and to a certain extent XQ35 I was spending allot of time on the binos looking at some of the 30,000 pheasants that the shoot puts down. It’s a problem that will never go away completely but the XG35 seems to give me the ability to walk on so much more.
In my humble opinion the XG35 is only about 10-15% behind the performance of its more expensive and much larger Helion XP50 pro cousin. Again I have used an XP50 pro stalking a fair bit so I feel qualified to compare. Just like high end optics though that 10% improvement can be very very expensive. It’s probably worth saying that movement of your target usually helps allot with id and the higher detail level the better you can judge that movement and determine if it’s a rabbit or hare or fox or badger etc. Hard to explain but you can’t see a white blob on a mushy background really move. A blob which you can determine leg length and see enough background detail starts to come alive when it moves and you just see “fox” etc.
I think you probably need to buy the thermal that based on the above gives you the level of detail you need and/or can afford. If you are happy to just know that there is a something hot over there then go cheap. If you want to know that the blob is probably a deer or stands a fair chance or being a deer at say 200 yards then probably the XQ. If you want to be certain it’s a deer and start to get the level of detail that can determine between a muntjac and a roe at 200 or see a fallow buck in velvet at 300 odd yards then XG or Helion I guess.
