Thermal Imaging Camera

Benm said:

Every 30 seconds would be nice, the cheap ones seem to do it about every other second, even in conditions where you would not expect the temperature of the actual sensor to change that much.

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I had no idea that they actually got that bad. A buddy of mine has their TG-130 model and it refreshes about as often as mine does. Maybe some have TEC integrated and the ones that don't get crippled by calibration time? That's my best guess...

Benm said:

One thing to look out for is how they deal with optical and thermal images combined.

Some units just save what is displayed, even if it's a thermal image overlaid on an optical image. This can be quite problematic especially when the optical image is color - red wires looking really hot whie they are just red and dead cold and such traps.

I reckon it will take a couple of years for the technology to properly mature and become available at low prices. Not that current dedicated IR camera's are that bad, but i think there will be some point where they will become common on smartphones as an integrated feature rather than an add on device you plug in.

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When I'm using it, for the most part I turn off the MSX or image combining features it offers. They serve a purpose, however they're certainly not my cup of tea. Especially when you're looking to calibrate the view distance. For a $1000 unit (not to mention the E8's $4000 price tag), you'd think they could spare some room to come up with a way to judge distance automatically and have a manual override option available. Dunno, it's a cool feature that I will never use.

That said... I do have something to note about the images themselves.

The image formats FLIR (at least this model) uses are a wee bit wonky. It stores everything as a .jpg. And I mean everything.

It contains the full IR image, the full spectral image, and the image you 'snapped' using the device. You need to use FLIR's software in order to pull the former two out, however the last one is readily available as the main image in the .jpg -- they open just fine in photo viewers.

Technically speaking, its probably just an image and a data set [thermal data] stored in the header with the rest of the metadata. Can't say I ever thought to keep more data in the file header than the file itself.

I never really got around the reason for storing the images that way, since they are available seperately and (i suppose) only combined on the display.

There really is no reason to to store the thermal image in a 'raw' format - it's pixel size is tiny already, things like sd storage is huge for a low price, so -why- do this? If it somehow stores the raw thermal image in some odd format that you can at least recover that's a good thing, the really cheap ones literally store the combined visible and ir image as a jpg photo with nothing else.

Same goes for the recalibration issue: the cheapest ones do this literally every other second, even when using them in a fairly constant temperature environment. This is very annoying, especially when you want to make a video of things showing how heat spreads in a device etc.

Benm said:

Same goes for the recalibration issue: the cheapest ones do this literally every other second, even when using them in a fairly constant temperature environment. This is very annoying, especially when you want to make a video of things showing how heat spreads in a device etc.

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All you have to do is plunk down the big bucks for a better Thermal camera
with a longer re-calibration time.
You know what they say.... You get what you pay for.

Jerry

Oh sure, but it's something often omitted in the specifications of them.

Often it will state resolution and temperature range, but not that it will spend 10% or more of it's time calibrating without you telling it to do so.

People getting entry level IR camera's might find this suprising. If you buy a cheap optical camera it will not do something like that. Perhaps autofocus might be a bit slow, exposure adjustment may be dubious, but it will not lock up into a state where it is unuable for quite some time every second or two.

I recently bought a FLIR ONE to use with my Samsung Galaxy S5 and haven't used it much yet, but when I have played with it I haven't noticed any pauses for calibration. I left the calibration setting at the default of automatic, but you can change that to manual in the settings menu and then it will only recaiibrate when you tell it to.

I think it's a pretty nifty tool for 250 USD.

Ed

Thamks for sharing this ZRaffleticket. I learned several new things I hadn't known before. To me, that's always worth while.