If you purchase ATN X-SIGHT 5, you have a nickname that you may not be aware of.
Beta Tester.
But after spending (wasting) a considerable amount of my Saturday afternoon, I think a more appropriate term would be Alpha Tester, or dare I say sucker.
Please don't take what I'm about to say as arrogance, but I do product development for a living, as a Sr. Software Engineer and Product Owner. If I let a product go to production in this state, I'm certain, I'd be looking for a new job by lunchtime.
Listen to the long list of problems:
They did a significant size and weight savings compared to the X-SIGHT 4K Pro with ABL. The numbers on paper are minor, but very significant when you swap from one scope to another.
ATN, why has thou forsaken me?
I have supported you, promoted you, hell, I've even been an evangelist for you! You have the best feature set of every digital scope around, but once again, you failed your customer commitment to delivering a quality product. A product I personally paid over $1300 for. Your biggest complaint with the X-SIGHT 4K Pro line was poor quality firmware, and instead of rectifying that issue, you exceeded the poor quality of your efforts past.
I don't work for free. I mean, who can afford to do that? But I feel like I just did unpaid work as an ATN Quality Control technician. ATN, I have some straight up advise for you:
Fire whoever green lit this release on both the engineering side and the business side. You would have been much better served to ship a quarter late than release trash to the market. You only get one chance to show this would be so much better than the X-SIGHT 4K, and you just blew it. Guess what else, the market isn't standing still. PARD, Sightmark and others are releasing solutions with integrated Ballistic Calculators, which is the reason I was attached to you in the first place.
It's best you release firmware to address these issues with all deliberate speed, or when the word gets out how ATN messed up yet again, I don't think the market will be so kind when other products are delivering when you can't.
Beta Tester.
But after spending (wasting) a considerable amount of my Saturday afternoon, I think a more appropriate term would be Alpha Tester, or dare I say sucker.
Please don't take what I'm about to say as arrogance, but I do product development for a living, as a Sr. Software Engineer and Product Owner. If I let a product go to production in this state, I'm certain, I'd be looking for a new job by lunchtime.
Listen to the long list of problems:
- RAV Calibration doesn't work in most cases. I was literally banging on the butt of my rifle until my hand hurt to try and get a reading to register. After several reboot sequences and lock ups, I got one reading to register once, but not enough to get RAV to calibrate.
- RAV doesn't work either. This isn't new to ATN, they didn't even use their own scopes to generate the 240p fps marketing videos, as the video is not from the perspective of the shooter. I guess they think we are just stupid for them to even try that one.
- Audio doesn't consistently record in all video resolutions. Only a few seconds of audio is recorded in all modes except for the mid quality 60p mode. This is a rookie mistake, and probably turning off power to the mic pre-amps and they are being powered by the filter capacitors for a few seconds.
- Video quality is okay, but just okay, not great. This is because they will record video in 4K resolution, but the sensor is only slightly bigger than 4K, which means that they are doing lossy interpolation, and making pixels up based on a nearest neighbor average or some similar filtering algorithm. But if you switch the video resolution to 1920ish, you still have soft quality because now they do line skipping of the sensor instead of down sampling. Ideally, to do digital zoom, like most all digital scopes that do not use a variable optical zoom system, the sensor needs to be a higher resolution than the delivered video at max magnification. This ain't that, not even close. They would need a 40MP sensor to do 4x base magnification and still ship 4K that is real detail.
- The number one rule of product development is be careful what features you support, because you will have to include them for eternity. ATN must didn't get the memo, because you can no longer play back video or review photos in their new flagship
- The headlining feature of generate your own reticle is nice. It would be nicer if imported reticles persisted after a power cycle.
- Just to show how bad this firmware is, we are once again given a product that can't keep time. I had a Sony Walkman that managed to keep time even after Y2K, so ATN, whatever you're doing, you're doing it wrong.
- Overall lack of effort. Icons are present the first time you enter a menu, but the second time, the icon is missing, or even worse stacked on top of another icon. I was at the range for 3 hours and was forced to do a hard reboot 3 times, so I guess they have some consistency in some ways.
- ATN Connect 5 app is suppose to be a major upgrade. Too bad the app isn't even available in the Google Play Store. How could you mess up this release?
- Sold me an SD- Card that goes with a scope billed (as another headline feature) that it records 4K video, but the SD-Card isn't rated to record 4K video. That's petty. You'd be better off not even offering cards at all than cards that will cause recording to fail. Are you purposely trying to generate support calls? If so, congratulations , you finally succeeded in a release goal!
They did a significant size and weight savings compared to the X-SIGHT 4K Pro with ABL. The numbers on paper are minor, but very significant when you swap from one scope to another.
ATN, why has thou forsaken me?
I have supported you, promoted you, hell, I've even been an evangelist for you! You have the best feature set of every digital scope around, but once again, you failed your customer commitment to delivering a quality product. A product I personally paid over $1300 for. Your biggest complaint with the X-SIGHT 4K Pro line was poor quality firmware, and instead of rectifying that issue, you exceeded the poor quality of your efforts past.
I don't work for free. I mean, who can afford to do that? But I feel like I just did unpaid work as an ATN Quality Control technician. ATN, I have some straight up advise for you:
Fire whoever green lit this release on both the engineering side and the business side. You would have been much better served to ship a quarter late than release trash to the market. You only get one chance to show this would be so much better than the X-SIGHT 4K, and you just blew it. Guess what else, the market isn't standing still. PARD, Sightmark and others are releasing solutions with integrated Ballistic Calculators, which is the reason I was attached to you in the first place.
It's best you release firmware to address these issues with all deliberate speed, or when the word gets out how ATN messed up yet again, I don't think the market will be so kind when other products are delivering when you can't.
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