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Reader Survey >HIKMICRO NEOS NH35L thermal riflescope review
- Last updated: 17/07/2026
HIKMICRO’s NEOS NH35L drops shutterless thermal onto a plain 30mm tube for £1,499.99. Ed Jackson ran it from daylight into full dark to work out which shooter it actually suits.
Thermal itself has not been the problem for a while now. Getting it onto a rifle without rethinking the whole setup is what puts people off: the odd tube diameters, the dedicated mounts, the weight sitting high over the action. The NEOS NH35L goes at that from the other end. HIKMICRO has built it around a plain 30mm tube, so it drops into whatever rings are already in the drawer and sits where a day scope would sit.
At £1,499.99 it heads a three-model range, with the NH25L at £999.99 and the NE25 at £849.99 underneath it. HIKMICRO calls the thinking behind the line the “Alpex 4K Lite Revolution”, which is shorthand for a fairly simple idea: take the shape and the menu of a digital scope people already get along with, and hang a thermal core on it. Pixfra and Nocpix are both scrapping hard at this money, so the pitch wanted proving rather than repeating.
Ed Jackson did the proving, running the NH35L in Wülf rings on a Daystate Delta Wolf. Open fields, hedgerows, thick woodland and barn work at spitting distance; rats at 10m through to hares several hundred metres out; sessions that started in daylight and carried on into full dark. The short version is that it delivers. The longer version is that which of the three you buy matters rather more than whether you buy one at all.
The HIKMICRO NEOS range: the NH35L (£1,499.99), NH25L (£999.99) and NE25 (£849.99).
Key features of the HIKMICRO NEOS NH35L, including its 18mK thermal sensor and integrated laser rangefinder.
570g is the figure that registers first. Pick the NH35L up expecting thermal-scope heft and it feels wrong in the hand, in a good way, and that difference tells across a long night on the rifle. It has not been achieved by cutting corners either: the unit feels dense and properly screwed together, and it carries an IP67 rating, so dust is a non-issue and a metre of water for half an hour will not kill it.
Anyone who has run an Alpex 4K Lite will recognise the chassis straight away, and the recognition is not just cosmetic – standard 30mm rings do the job, with no adapters and no head-scratching over ride height. It measures 290mm without the rubber eyecup, 345.6mm with, which is short enough that a light rifle does not suddenly feel nose-heavy. The rotating magnetic objective cap is one of those small details that stops mattering right up until it is three in the morning and you are one-handed.
The controls read like a conventional scope, too. Rubberised focusing collar at the objective, dioptre at the eyepiece, three turrets on the saddle. The right-hand turret has a small rubber power button that drops the unit to standby on a single press. The left holds the removable 18650, which comes in the box. The top turret carries three buttons for the menu, video recording and the rangefinder, plus a rotating collar for magnification and menu navigation. Cold start to picture takes a second.
The NEOS NH35L mounted on the Daystate Delta Wolf during field testing.
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The NH35L’s 35mm objective lens houses a 384×288 thermal detector with sub-18mK sensitivity.
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The headline claim is a 384×288 @ 12µm sensor reading below 18mK, and the picture backs the number up. Fields, hedgerows, thick woodland, a yard full of old farm machinery – all of it came through clean and properly resolved rather than as the soft grey soup a weaker sensor serves up. In daylight, at 10m, a rat drinking well inside dense cover was there to be identified. At 37m in the dark, the individual leaves and stems between muzzle and rabbit were visible, which is not a party trick: it is what tells you a pellet is going to clip something on the way.
It got better as the night went on. Once the ambient temperature falls away the differential between a warm animal and a cold background widens, and the NH35L cashed that in – rabbits picked up, tracked and identified from 30m out to 150m without any real effort. Behind it all is HIKMICRO’s Image Pro 3.0 processing, fed to a 0.49in AMOLED that is bright, sharp and sensibly sized for the unit.
A thermal image through the NEOS NH35L – clarity and detection range both impressed during night testing.
Nearly every thermal optic recalibrates its detector with a mechanical shutter. The picture stops for a second or two, at a moment of its own choosing, and then comes back. In a spotter you shrug it off. In a riflescope, with something moving through the frame, it is a genuine handicap.
HSIS does away with the shutter altogether, and with the Sync Pro algorithm handling the processing the view simply never stops. No freeze on the shot you were about to take. It is an easy thing to describe and a hard thing to appreciate until you have used a scope that does it, and across every session on test it did not miss a beat.
The HikMicro Shutterless Image System (HSIS) eliminates the periodic freeze common to most thermal scopes.
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The integrated laser rangefinder is accurate to 1,000m and feeds directly into the onboard ballistic calculator.
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One thing to know before you compare spec sheets. The data sheet says the base magnification is 4.0×; the scope itself displays 3.2×. That is the true native magnification of the 35mm lens rather than a rounded-up marketing figure, and it is common enough across thermal optics, but it is worth holding in mind when you line the NEOS up against a rival quoting the friendlier number.
In use the lower figure is the better one. A true 3.2× hands you a slightly wider field than a true 4× would, and width is what you want when a rat is moving and the range is short. Measured at 11m the field spanned roughly 1.4m, which lines up exactly with the quoted 13.1m at 100m. Digital zoom takes it out to 25.6× when the range opens up.
Zeroing was done with the tinfoil cross trick – a scrap of foil taped to the board, angled slightly skywards so it reads cold against the backing and gives you something unambiguous to aim at. The one-shot zero function behaved, and a couple of confirmation groups said it had stuck. The menu will feel like home to any Alpex Pro user, which shortened the job considerably. The ballistic calculator was fed muzzle velocities straight off the Delta Wolf’s own display after each shot, which is about as painless as that job gets, and the 1,000m rangefinder on the top turret read true throughout. Five zeroing profiles mean the scope can move between rifles or calibres without disturbing the primary zero, and the menu also carries a choice of reticles and a toggle between observation and detection modes.
The NEOS uses a standard 30mm tube chassis, so it takes a wide range of scope rings.
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The on-screen menu is easy to navigate, with quick access to palettes, zero profiles and the ballistic calculator.
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Palettes run to Black Hot, White Hot, Red Hot, Fusion, Red Monochrome and Green Monochrome, and you can choose which of them cycle on a quick press of the menu button – handy when you are moving between a bright yard and a black wood. The interface as a whole is a lift from HIKMICRO’s Alpex work, and it shows: nobody is going to need the manual in the field.
The NEOS NH35L does what HIKMICRO says it does. The sensor holds a clean picture as conditions shift, the shutterless system is exactly the advantage it is claimed to be, and the 30mm tube takes the mounting headache out of buying thermal – which, for a lot of shooters, has been the actual barrier all along.
The only real question is which rifle it belongs on. At £1,499.99, with 55mm of eye relief, an 8mm exit pupil and a recoil rating that runs to centrefire, it is pointed at rimfire and stalking rifles as much as anything else, and on those it is fairly priced for what it delivers. If your shooting is close-range pest control with a sub-12ft/lb airgun, look hard at the NH25L at £999.99 first – it is the same idea, better matched to the ranges you actually shoot, and £500 cheaper.
Find out more about the HIKMICRO NEOS NH35L at Elite Optical
The NH35L has a UK RRP of £1,499.99, which puts it at the top of the NEOS range – the NH25L is £999.99 and the NE25 £849.99. Prices are RRP at time of publication and may have changed; Elite Optical at eliteoptical.co.uk has current availability.
The NH35L has the larger 35mm lens, a 384×288 sensor and a 3.2×–25.6× magnification range at £1,499.99. The NH25L runs a 25mm lens and a 320×240 sensor at £999.99. For close-range airgun pest control the NH25L is the more sensible buy; the NH35L makes its case on rimfire and centrefire.
Yes. HIKMICRO rates it to the same recoil standard as the Alpex Pro, and the 55mm eye relief and 8mm exit pupil support that. Five independent zeroing profiles let one scope move between rifles or calibres without losing the primary zero.
It does – an integrated unit good to 1,000m, worked from the top turret, feeding an onboard ballistic calculator that handles hold-over. Muzzle velocity can be entered directly to set up drop compensation for a given load or calibre.
Through Elite Optical, the UK distributor, at eliteoptical.co.uk. Contact them directly for stockists and availability.
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