Thanks for joining us here at Night Chenanigans, home for esoteric night vision and thermal reviews. Last time we took a look at Legoing PVS-31A pods. Well today we take a look at the new hotness that is the INFITAC Fast Mini thermal sight.
INFITAC Fast Mini
So INFITAC calls their mini thermal sight the "Fast Mini". Not exactly the most unique name and it is a little vague as to what it is refering to. Well the Fast Mini is a miniature thermal weapon sight that is small enough that you can mount it to pistols.
When you get the Fast Mini, it comes with an RMR footprint adapter plate. See photo below. The plate comes with screws and they do fit most RMR pattern threaded holes. However if you optic mount has different sized screw holes, you will need counter sink screws. Here the counter sink screws im using has the wrong angle for the counter sink head so it sticks up and isnt flush with the mount.
The Fast Mini sits in that adapter plate and is held with four steel screws. Size wise the Fast Mini is about the size of enclosed red dots like the Steiner MPS and Griffin Armament red dot.
As I said, the Fast Mini comes with an RMR patterned adapter plate. Here it is mounted to a Glock 17 slide that was milled for RMR.
While it is neat that you can mount the Fast Mini to a pistol slide, I did not find it to be that useful. First of all the Fast Mini only has a 5 hour run time. So if the battery dies, you can no longer aim your pistol. Maybe if you have a VIS laser mounted underneath the dust cover, you could still aim but that is not an ideal setup.
Another issue I noticed is the fact that the Fast Mini sits rather low on a pistol slide. So if you run a suppressor, it will be in the FOV of the thermal sensor. For those who do not shoot suppressed, suppressors capture the hot gases coming out of the muzzle which causes the suppressor to heat up. Now your hot suppressor will glow in front of the thermal. This is not good for a thermal sensor. You do not want a hot object to be stationary in front of the sensor. Like an old CRT monitor. you could permanently burn this image into the thermal sensor.
I mounted the thermal pistol sight on my FLUX Raider. But due to the fact that I am staring into a screen, I have a hard time focusing if it is too close to my face. Mounting it forward on the Virtuous Concepts rail worked well and no issue of any hot suppressors being in the field of view of the thermal objective.
Virtuous Concepts has an optics bridge for the P365 Raider and even though this raider is smaller, the screen was at a comfortable distance for my eyes to focus on it.
I tried moving the Fast Mini closer and it still worked.
Using the Fast Mini
One aspect of the Fast Mini is the fact that you are looking at a screen as opposed to a thermal optic with an eyepiece that focuses the image for your eye. So the Fast Mini can only be seen at a distance your eyes can focus at. You can test this with your smart phone. Turn on your phone and have the home screen or this article open. Then slowly move your screen closer to your face. How close can you get before your eyes can not focus on what is displayed on the screen? That is how close the Fast Mini can be on your gun.
The other issue is close focus vs target focus. The screen will cause you to have to shift your focus to see what is on the screen. Somewhat like hard front sight focus on your hand gun. See the image below. On the left I focused on the screen. On the right I focused on the door. I have my red dot still on the P365 Raider slide to show the focal shift.
Could you use the Fast Mini as your primary aiming device? Yes but I do not recommend it. Just like the pistol slide mounted example, if the battery dies then you can no longer aim your weapon. However for the sake of testing I did mount it on a number of firearms.
Below I mounted it on my Broad River tactical upper to see if the MP5 SD suppressor would show up under the thermal. Fortunately the Fast Mini is high enough that it does not see the suppressor.
I also mounted it to my Mossberg 500 Roadblocker using a Jawbone RMR mount.
I run my stock LOP at short as possible so the Fast Mini was a little too close to my face than I would like.
Here it is on a Mossberg Shockwave.
Since the Fast Mini came with an RMR adapter plate, I tried an unconventional setup and mounted it on top of the Penumbra laser.
I personally prefer to run the Fast Mini on an offset mount next to another thermal sight. Here it is mounted using a Valhalla Tactical RMR mount. It clears the SKEETIR-L both when the SKEETIR-L is inline with my Primary Arms 3x Cyclops or when I flip it to the side.
Since the Fast Mini just has a back lit screen, it will light up your face. So use the sleep feature as often as possible at night.
Another option for mounting is to have it at 12 o'clock on an optic. I am using the Pelc Primary Arms red dot mount.
The thermal performance is not bad for the Fast Mini. It is jsut a 256 sensor with a 13mm lens givng it a 0.5x FOV. You can spread the touch screen to zoom to 1x but i prefer the wider FOV of 0.5x.
I was able to recognize a person 100 yards away.
And tarantulas are exothermic. They show up under thermal.
The controls for the Fast Mini are pretty straight forward. The screen is touch activated. If you swipe up or down to change color palette. Swipw to the right to change reticle color (green, black, white or red). Swipe to the left to change from dot, small circle dot or large circle dot. If the screen gets wet, you will have a hard time using the touch screen.
Final Thoughts On The Fast Mini Thermal Sight
The Inifitac Fast Mini thermal pistol sight retails only for $699. This is $1,000 cheaper than the Holosun DRS-TH however it cannot be used when it is off. I rather have this augment a primary optic on an offset or mounted on the optic. Yes you will have to point your weapon at everything you look at. But it is great for hunting to be able to have a simple thermal scanner to quickly assess if there are any potential game in the area. Once you detect something that draws your attention you can switch toyour primary aiming device.
The Fast Mini is launching today at 9 am. Go to Infitac's website to check it out.
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