I like to experiment with oddball concepts, and while I freely admit that many (most?) don’t work out, I always learn something along the way.

My latest acquisition is a Meprolight Foresight optic. For those of you with short memories, this is a digital reflex sight that came out a few years ago. You configure it with an app, there’s a compass and level in it, there used to be a shot counter, etc. Unfortunately, it oozes unrealized potential because they never got around to adding features like custom reticles, configurable BDC, and so forth.

Anyways, one cool feature of the Foresight is essentially that it stores multiple zero configurations in the app that can be uploaded to your sight. This has obvious application for .300 BLK where supers and subs can have somewhat different zeroes. Being able to adjust zero for my chosen ammo with a few clicks seems nice. How can I leverage this on my night-fighting .300BLK gun? Will it work with NV?

The Foresight makes no claim of night vision compatibility one way or the other, so it’s an open question of whether it could work in this context.

My initial experiments with the Foresight were mildly encouraging. It has a VERY heavy notch filter coating (almost purple-ish during the daylight), albeit it does not seem to impact IR transmission much – it is pretty comparable to the Eotech XPS3 and Holosun AEMS, which was really rather surprising to me given how dark the window was. The reticle at brightness level 1 seems brighter than I’d prefer for night vision (it was easily visible to the naked eye in the dark), but at least in my suburban backyard (lots of ambient IR), brightness level 0 had almost no halo and looked super sharp. If this thing had a brightness level between 0 and 1, it’d be just perfect for NV use.

The controls (digital and physical) are a little underwhelming for night vision use. Changing anything makes the UI pop up and raises the brightness to a higher level than you’d want piping through your I2 tubes (although I doubt bright enough to do them permanent damage). The buttons are also a bit hard to feel out in the dark. This is not a big deal for my use, but could be annoying in a military or duty context.

First step… daytime zeroing. I took my SBR with the Foresight out to the NRA HQ range to zero it. To really flex the capabilities of the Foresight, I decided to zero it with both my 125gr supersonic and my 200gr subsonic reloads. I was using a Unity Tactical riser to get the sight up a little higher to make it more comfortable for eventual NV usage.

Meprolight recommends the “Double Shoot” app to zero the Foresight, so I decided to give it a go. Free two week trial, etc. Truthfully, I was quite impressed with it, and may actually get a subscription ($18 a year). The image scanning software worked correctly with minimal fuss, and the recommendations it made for adjustment were dead on. In particular, the subsonics at 10m really only required two passes (initial and confirmation) to zero in, which is amazing given how zeroing seems to drag on for me at times.

The 10m zero sounds super sketchy, but it turns out that it basically gives you a 10/200 zero if you’re willing to accept +- 12″ out to 200m. I can easily get hits at a hundred by holding to the bottom of the target. In fact, my 12yro could consistently ring steel doing this, so it doesn’t even require that much skill.

The Meprolight app itself is meh. I had to turn off Bluetooth and the app and cycle the optic’s bluetooth to make it work at first. It was OK after that. I set up two profiles, one for supers, one for subs. It seemed like it worked as expected. The optic itself is darker than I’d prefer due to the notch filter tinting, but I didn’t have any trouble with it indoors.

Taking it out in the dark for a bit of shooting under night vision, I immediately noticed that the UI turns itself on whenever you take a shot, which I guess I didn’t notice in daytime shooting. You can correct this issue by putting it on low power mode. The reticle is still a bit dimmer than I’d prefer, but I found it usable with the irises fully open. If you spend a lot of time with your night vision’s aperture less than totally exposed, you may find it’s simply too dim. I used the circle cross reticle, which is pretty thin and I thought worked pretty well; it’s possible other reticles would be more usable in such scenarios.

One other thing I noticed after a bunch of testing was that the battery 1) doesn’t seem to have much parasitic drain while off and 2) recharges absurdly fast from a typical fast charger battery. While I am not a fan of being unable to swap batteries in the field, it looks like typical power management logistics should be able to cope with the Foresight’s recharging needs.

So, summing it up: it’s pretty usable, but if night vision is a primary use case, it seems like you’d want an Eotech E/XPS3 instead at the same price point because it simply has much better night vision brightness settings. In a way, it’s really sad that Meprolight gave up on the Foresight so soon and discontinued software updates; a few more firmware and app revisions might have made this an optic to beat, as it’s pretty close to greatness as it is.