A dedicated night vision weapon sight is one that replaces a day scope for any type of gun or rifle.
In other words, it is a weapon sight or scope all to itself.
It includes a housing, an objective lens (typically a magnification of no less than 4x),a night vision image tube, and usually, aninfrared illuminator is included to help with aiming.
Dedicated night vision scopes are usually set up to be mounted to a Weaver and/or Picatinny rail system.
Dedicated night vision weapon scopes, more often than not, are the better way to go if you are looking to achieve pinpoint accuracy in your aiming and shooting at night.
Particularly at long distances, where windage and elevation adjustments become critical to obtain accuracy.
Weapons mountable night vision monoculars, on the other hand, are not quite as accurate because they require an additional sighting system or scope to be mounted in front of them on the rail.
While this does provide accuracy at closer distances and CQB situations, it does not provide the accuracy or the magnification you need for longer distances.
Providing magnification to a monocular mounted system is difficult.
Monoculars typically get manufactured and come standard with a 1x objective lens.
3x and 5x magnifier lenses are accessory items, and typically cannot be mounted onto the monocular and put behind a sighting system, such as the Eotech or Aimpoint.
The weapon or rifle rail is many times not long enough, and if you are able to get it to fit, it looks awkward.
Suffice it say, that if you are looking to get a monocular for long distance aiming and shooting at night, you may want to rethink your options.
While the monocular is very popular due to it's versatility in use, such as being weapons mountable, camera adaptable, helmet mountable, head mountable, and hand held, it is not optimal for long range shooting.
It is worth mentioning that there is a new piece of equipment available now to the night vision long range shooter called the AN/PVS-22.
It is called a weapon sight because it was designed to be mounted on a weapon or rifle, but it is not quite a "dedicated weapon sight".
The reason being that it isn't a stand alone scope.
The PVS-22is a unique night vision system that is small enough to mount in front of any boresighted daytime scope.
Scope magnification can range from one to twelve power.
The PVS-22 does not require any boresighting and once mounted the daysight provides the aiming point.
The PVS-22 maintains boresight despite normal misalignments due to mount position errors and does not alter the sighting centerline (parallax is unchanged from dayscope).
The UNS (Universal Night Sight) also contains no beam splitter or folded optics to go out of alignment.
The PVS-22 can maintain accuracy at longer distances because the larger the magnification, the narrower the field of view.
The narrow the field of view, the more channeled it is through the PVS-22.
While the AN/PVS-22 may maintain a level of accuracy for long range shooting at night, it doesn't come much cheaper than a dedicated night vision scope.
In fact, it may even be more expensive.
It just depends on the quality of the night vision image tube in it.