Trijicon is best known for their Bright and Tough Night Sights on pistols. A few years ago they came out with a new line of night sights: the HD Night Sights. They solve the problem that night sights have: daytime shooting. Night sights are sometimes hard to pick up during daylight conditions.
The HD Night Sights differ from standard night sights by having a a big dot for the front sight. The tritium vial is surrounded by Yellow or Orange fiber optic ring. The rear sights have a raised shelf to assist with racking the slide for one handed operations. The rear face of the rear sights are serrated to deflect light and have two small vials of tritium on either side of the U notch center. I find the U notched rear sights very effective in helping with the sight picture. The whole system helps the user focus on getting a perfect sight picture with the main focus on the bright front sight without the rear sight being too much of a distraction. In bright lighting conditions, the fiber optic ring just jumps out at you, making your target acquisition that much faster.
My Heckler and Koch VP9 came with the stock factory sights that were luminescent night sights that require a lighting source (a flashlight) to charge the Luminova paint on the metal sights. They were extremely bright when you shined your flashlight on them for a quick burst. They were also extremely bright during daylight conditions. They would work for most people but not for me. My VP9 lives in my duty holster for the majority of its time. With the front sight always in the dark, the Luminova never gets a charge so if I had to draw my weapon to deal with a threat in a low light situation, I wouldn’t be able to see the front sight at all. The rear sights would be glowing but that didn’t help me at all. Luckily I always run a Weapon Mounted Light on my duty weapon and if you do as well, you’d know that any weapon light would make your sights shadows. Why do you need night sights if you have a WML? The answer is, you don’t run your light the entire time because you’re a bright target if you do that. When your light is off, you will still need to see your sights to make that shot.
Front Sight focus
Rear Sight focus
I got my HD Night Sights off of Instagram, new from someone who went away from the VP9 platform for $100. They retail for much more than that. The one’s I got were with the Yellow front sight. I wanted the Orange but a deal’s a deal and I’m still happy with them.
Installation was something I learned that I couldn’t do myself. I had my MGW USP sight pusher, which didn’t work because the VP9 has a pair of plastic slide assist tabs at the rear of the slide. This prevented the slide from entering the sight pusher. Luckily for me, my department armorers have a MGW universal sight pusher system and all I had to do was buy a VP9 shoe for $15 from Brownell’s and they took care of the installation for me.
The HD Night Sights are easily the best night sights I’ve ever shot with on a pistol in any light. I’ve seen videos and read other reviews and haven’t seen or heard anyone complain about them.
The sights are taller than standard sights and I was worried that they wouldn’t fit in my Safariland Duty holster and luckily for me, they barely fit. I was very relieved that it reholstered after the install because these sights are too good not to have on my VP9.