L3Harris

For information about products by Harris, go to the page Elbit Systems Of America. See the History section for details.

Logo

L3Harris is an American company producing various military equipment, including image intensifier tubes, night vision devices and more.

Reputation

L3Harris has a high reputation of revolutionizing military technology and capabilities. They have massive productions of radios, radar equipment and night vision. The company mainly focuses on delivering to the U.S. armed forces, where they have many contracts. The company does also sell to the civilian market, however it is very limited, and the company focuses most on the contracts given by the government, which often results in long waiting times for nightvision.

History

• In 2019, L3 and Harris merged to L3Harris. Harris sold their night vision arm to Elbit.

Products

Devices

• AN/PVS-14 (M914A)

Image Intensifiers

Unfilmed

A comparison between an L3 Unfilmed and a Photonis 4G image intensifier.

Around the year 2000 L3 released the first filmless tubes, originally called Infinity. Over the years, continual improvements to the technology were made, extending reliability and increasing performance, while producing at an ever increasing consistency.

L3 Unfilmed image intensifiers, as of today, outperform all other tubes by a considerable margin, with exceptional performance even in very low ambient light conditions, often reaching an SNR of 35 and above, and a FOM of up to 4000.

Due to patents L3 is currently the only western company producing filmless image intensifier tubes.

SuperGain

In 2022, the American night vision retailer TNVC launched a new offer of night vision devices featuring L3Harris Unfilmed image intensifiers labelled SuperGain. In contrast to standard Unfilmed image intensifiers, these feature a drastically increased gain of 100,000-120,000 fL/fc instead of the usual 40,000-80,000 fL/fc, with no decrease in lifespan.

The theory is that these image intensifiers come from the production line aimed at fulfilling new procurement contracts in the Omni 9 category for the U.S. military.

Further Reading

1. Official statement of L3Harris on lifetime of their Unfilmed image intensifiers https://www.nite-walker.com/amp/facts-about-l3-filmless-straight-from-the-horse-s-mouth