I have a friend that deals in nv quite a bit he also test alot of products, He personally own many gen 3 and 4 nv units. I had questioned him about the pulsar 550 and he said its basically the same thing as turning your video camera on the night vision setting, stated it works great in urban areas were there are street lights, but in a wooded area he was lucky to be able to shoot 50 yards.
I've used both Gen 3 in the military and the Digiscope and it is not how you say it is. The digiscope is in my opinion just about as equal to gen 3 scopes. I can see hogs with it at 300 yards on a 1/4 moon without IR. Digiscope's and technology like it are about to make regular nightvison scopes have to drop their prices and make everyone who purchased a Gen 3 very unhappy with the loss of value to their equipment. Pulsar is not the only company using the Digital night vision technology, the Elcan day/night scope uses the same technology as the digiscope but also operates in color during the day. Right now we are filming hunts for The Sportsmans Channel and we use the Digiscope for our show. It preforms better than expected for the price.