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  • willis936 - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Neat.
  • paul878 - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Could you please post some better pictures taken by the camera, such as people, house, animals.
  • Phiro69 - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Holy smokes, yes. Nothing says "this would be useful" than screenshot after screenshot of nearly uniform orange backgrounds.

    I would love to know if this would be capable of thermally scanning your dwelling for temperature leaks, for instance.
  • icrf - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    This is the wall around my fireplace. You can see the two porthole windows and the stone hearth as being cooler than average, but the rest looks okay. There's a little more loss in the corner on the right going up the cathedral ceiling, too, but not much I can do about that.

    https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AjXbZjNBMJI/VMF...

    Everything is a bit fuzzy (hey, it's a cheap low-res camera), and I'm not sure about the minimum temperature difference it can detect, or if slight variations just get lost in the noise. If you want to find an insulation problem, it would probably have to be a bad one to be obvious.
  • icrf - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Here's what that wall looks like (the split screen photo option in the app saves two separate photos if viewed outside the app, but the FOV and exact location is different): https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ezEjypVpl0Q/VMF...
  • Gunbuster - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    But then you could see how terribad the resolution is...
  • icrf - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    The FLIR was interesting in that it would combine the visible photo with the thermal photo and use the higher resolution visible image to enhance detail and overlay some thermal information. I think the sensor in that camera was actually lower than this one, so you actually get less thermal data (assuming similar quality sensors), but it's processed into something much prettier.

    Honestly, getting any thermal camera south of a $1,000 seems like a good start.
  • soccerballtux - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    thermal photos could actually be just as high resolution as your cellphone's normal photos but an IR filter is intentionally placed over the CCD to remove the IR, and with Camera addons like this one, an aftermarket blur is intentionally added to the image to reduce resolution
  • hammer256 - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    CCDs can capture near IR, but not the far IR for good thermal imaging.
  • Daniel Egger - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    Please read the article before posting this nonsense. It actually explains the difference in hardware between real thermal imaging and fake IR imaging which can be achieved by removing the IR filter from the sensor of a regular camera.
  • soccerballtux - Monday, May 4, 2015 - link

    oh, sorry, I def don't bother reading before commenting, and I'm not trolling, I really don't
  • III-V - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    There's some in the second gallery, with the images from the camera hooked up to the Dell tablet. But yeah, the LG gallery was basically useless...
  • icrf - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    I bought one a few months ago and took a variety of pictures. I initially got it to check for water infiltration behind my basement wall, and to check for insulation problems in my new house. Didn't find much in either case, but it's still a neat toy.

    Here's a wood fire in my fireplace, doors half closed. It shows the cropping of out of range heat sources: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0nI7vvE2kss/VMF...

    Here's the piping from my water heater (it's a forced induction model, the large diagonal pipe is the exhaust, and the house originally had radiators, hence the distribution block above, but is still using the hot water for hydronic heating, ie, pipes going across the room is going to the forced air system): https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-DOkKb4enigY/VMF...

    Speaking of the force air system, here's the piping that is the radiator: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ZpLEEC3JM40/VMF...

    Here's the poor circulation in my hand: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S_2o-FJkBF0/VMF...

    A friend's dog: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ZfoakkyVmZg/VMF...

    My gas range after cooking something: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-vWoxkzCWCAs/VMF...

    Cooking a sandwich on an aluminum griddle: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-IpDCRdtM_24/VMF...

    Selfie, mouth open, but inhaling through my nose (it was neat to see the change when inhaling/exhaling): https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-SAf2x2-4vMk/VIR...

    My girlfriend wearing a down jacket and glasses taking a drink of water from a bottle: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-T6RqL-dhM0Q/VIR...

    I have a neat video of water boiling, but that's a little harder to link to.

    Also, I have a Moto X and a Nexus 7, and their USB plugs face opposite directions. I use the phone for normal pictures, and the tablet for selfies. Works out pretty good.

    Any requests?
  • edwpang - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Pretty cool!
  • bp2008 - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    I have two of these for Android, and a $20 Nubee non-contact thermometer from Amazon. The Seek thermal cameras are both the same; they read consistently about 8 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the Nubee.

    After months of inaccurate readings, there is still no way to calibrate the temperature shown on-screen and in snapshots or videos.

    I have not measured properly, but the frame rate feels like it is below 6 FPS (even on FAST android devices), and it drops a frame every time it self-calibrates (every few seconds) so its video is inconsistent and choppy.

    It also does a poor job of seeing fine temperature differences, compared to more expensive thermal cameras. Sure, it will pick a cat out of the bushes just fine, but it will not show you the studs behind drywall nearly as well as a more expensive thermal camera.
  • SilthDraeth - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    ICRF , do you by chance have an empty field or something, that you could see if a dog, or cat shows up at 100 ft, or more in the dark?
  • icrf - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    There's a gallery up on the mfg's website with a bunch more random photos: http://www.thermal.com/gallery/

    I remember when I bought it, pre-user gallery, they specifically had one of a guy hopping a fence from 50 feet away. I'm leaving on vacation tomorrow for a week, so probably won't have the option to find something nice. Best I could do are my neighbor's dogs in their fenced in yard.

    Daylight or dark shouldn't make much difference. If anything, dark would be easier to spot, thermally, because the background might be cooler.
  • blue_urban_sky - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    I have 2 requests, Could you take a pic of boiling water with the reported temperature and also a glass of water with a lot of ice cubes in again with the temp reading. Thinking ice in water should equalise to roughly 0 deg C.

    Looking to get accuracy so also altitude of the tests if you have it :) or your rough location and I'll find it.
  • Mr Perfect - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    How does it do if you point it inside your desktop? It would be interesting to find hot spots that aren't being cooled properly.
  • FYoung - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    Those photos are neat, icrf. Especially the one of your hand.
  • icrf - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link

    Now that G+ Photos has exited G+, it's easier to share links to videos. Here's the one of the water boiling: https://goo.gl/photos/5rQx7kqJSDvzcWRGA
  • ganeshts - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    One of our fellow readers has provided a nice set of images. I have also added a page prior to the concluding section with some sample images.
  • slashbinslashbash - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Having experienced crashing my car into a moose on a dark Colorado highway, I am extremely interested in this technology as some kind of early warning system for night driving in areas where there are likely to be deer or other large animals. I would love to see some samples of the output for far-away warm objects such as humans or other animals.
  • Daniel Egger - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    You'd have to mount it outside of the car though as even the reflectivity of regular glass completely throws off the sensor, let alone car windshields and windows which usually usually coated with vaporized metal specifically to block IR and UV.
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    How are they getting a 720p video out of a 206x156 sensor? Unless they're able to jiggle the sensor back and forth a fraction of a pixel to interpolate a higher resolution, wouldn't 720p offer nothing except resizing artifacts over a lower resolution version?
  • ganeshts - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    It is upsampling with some tricks, as explained in this paper: http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJSH/vol8_no1_2014/5...

    In higher-end thermal imagers, the optical image sensor output is also used along with the thermal sensor's output to do a better job of the upsampling.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Save some money:
    http://amzn.com/B00CVHIJDK
  • ganeshts - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    No doubts about that for certain applications, but for a majority of the use cases (checking for moving animals in the dark, finding the hotspots in a PC quickly, tracing clogs in plumbing etc.), the IR thermometers just won't cut it :) Trust me, I have used both - for different purposes :)
  • carlwu - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    I have this device. Around doors and windows, you can plainly see where there is heat loss in the winter time. Some areas you can address, others you can't.
  • SilthDraeth - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    I love how the guy in the comments has taken more useful pictures than the reviewer. Sure, taking the pictures the reviewer took contains data. But for god sake, take pictures of animals at night. Etc. For instance, I was contemplating this device, I was curious if on a pitch dark night, if I could see a coyote at 300 feet away in the darkness based on his heat signature. Obviously, coyotes aren't going to play nice, but, if a person would show up on an empty field at 300 feet it would be enough information for me to go off of.
  • Folterknecht - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    So now Anandtech is finally able to include IR images of VRMs on GPUs and mobos? High Time - after seeing the IR images on TH with the initial GTX 960 review (100°C +)
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Maybe. It depends on if it's just a review loaner or not. If it's something that was bought/donated *one* of the editors could use it for improved thermal measuring. The Anandtech writers work from home at various locations around the world; there's no central office where they can all borrow from a shared set of toys.
  • dave1231 - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Bang goes my rough sleeping in the park bushes.
  • Impulses - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    How does this compare to the old DSLR & mirrorless cameras that people convert into IR? Output seems rougher here but I dunno if that actually makes it more useful for testing purposes.
  • RandomUsername3245 - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Those IR DSLRs see the infrared region that is *barely* above what our eyes can see, e.g. we see roughly wavelengths = 0.4-0.7 um. The IR SLRs see ~0.7-1.0um. These SLRs don't see thermal emission until roughly the same temperature as we see it with our naked eye: when things glow red hot. Thermal cameras like the Seek see longwave infrared, which is roughly ~8-14 um. This is a substantially different wavelength region than the SLRs.
  • mike8675309 - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    The killer thing these type of cameras can do is take a picture with both visible and IR cameras. Then overlay the IR on the visible image to make it easier to pinpoint where the hot spots are in relation to things.
  • fobosca - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link

    Unfortunately this is just a toy. Expensive one. I am professional thermographer and was using multiple FLIR cameras. Thermal resolution is too low for any practical use. Unless of cuz you wanna take pictures if your cat and you have some money to burn. Good luck trying to get any accurate temperature.
  • sor - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    Am I missing something, or are we being misled by a conflation of the visible and infrared resolutions? At 32k it seems this has a resolution between a FLIR E6 and E8, which range in the thousands of dollars.
  • Daniel Egger - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    I happen to own a FLIR i7 which has a lower resolution but from what I'm reading seems to be vastly more accurate than the Seek Thermal (when set to the correct material/reflectivity) and have a higher resolution for the temperature readout (you can actually locate wirings in brick walls even with only low currents passing through).

    I'd be really interested in a shootout between those add-ons and dedicated IR thermographing gear let's say up to a couple thousand bucks.
  • thebeastie - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    Yeah LOL there are a few reviews of this on the web that have heaps better pictures of cars etc.
    Those pics on this review are super boring, I can only assume the reviewer was asked to review this and has absolutely no interest in it.

    What would be really handy for me with this is checking for bad battery cells or links on ebike batteries under load...
    https://www.google.com.au/search?q=18650+e+bike+ba...
  • Phiro69 - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    I think you nailed it on the head, thebeastie. It really smells like the reviewer was told to review it and has no passion/interest in the field.

    A review like this would never have seen the light of day under Anand; I believe this is a harbinger of the content of Anandtech now that Anand has left and the site was sold to Tom's Hardware and the new management consists of ex-executives from CNET and Ziff-Davis, I'm removing my Anandtech bookmark. It's been a great ~15 years (yes, I've been reading it that long), but all good things come to an end.

    -Kelly Schoenhofen
  • ganeshts - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    Kelly, Thanks for your valuable feedback - which, btw, tells me nothing that should have been added to the review.

    As for the original comment - I added a new section with pictures after that comment was posted.

    I challenge you to find a review of the Seek Thermal camera on any other site which :

    1. Gives a concise overview of how thermal imagers operate
    2. Track power consumption numbers of a system to which the Seek Thermal camera attaches itself / app is activated.
    3. Continuous use of the Seek Thermal camera for other reviews (we use it in all our passive PC thermal design evaluation if you can follow the link that has been posted in the review)

    The only feedback aspect from other readers - that has been taken note of and immediately responded to (I actually have plenty of thermal images from the Seek Thermal - but, most were taken without the camera image at the same time - so not fit to present for comparison purposes)

    I look forward to your response.
  • PrinceGaz - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    "The Seek Thermal camera connects to the microUSB port of a smart device, and hence, the measurement of the power consumption of the camera is quite challenging."

    Rubbish. Use an in-line USB current monitor, together with the necessary adapters/leads (whichever is most convenient) to connect it to the Android device and the IR camera. That will give a quite accurate continuous reading of how much current the camera itself is using. Given that USB should be more or less 5V, converting that to Watts is straightforwards.

    Measuring the voltage and current drain from the Android device's battery as you did introduces not just factors related to the power the tablet itself is using, but also how efficiently it can provide the 5V to the USB socket, which will vary from device to device.
  • ganeshts - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    'Challenging' is always relative. Most people don't have the stuff that you mention at hand. Once I had the proper SSH server installed in the tablet, my script to track, record and plot the power consumption took less than 15 minutes. - all I needed was a PC to run the script / SSH client on.

    Also, tracking power consumption for the system as a whole makes sense - we don't really know how much of the post processing is done via software on the app side compared to the hardware inside the thermal camera.
  • ganeshts - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    Forgot to add: The tracking of the power consumption of the system helps in estimating how much battery life would be impacted if one were to keep, say, running the app's preview from the thermal camera continuously (obviously assuming that the battery capacity is known). Tracking the power consumption of the camera alone doesn't provide much benefit to the readers.
  • Shalmanese - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    "A few cases are provided below. It can be seen that the temperature is not very accurate - for example, skin temperature is reported to be around 32 C, when it is obviously around 37 C."

    Your internal body temperature is 37C but exposed skin is much cooler, generally around 27 - 35C because it's constantly radiating heat. This can be trivially confirmed by noticing that you armpits and inside of your mouth are much warmer than the back of your hand or your forehead for example.

    I just checked with a reference thermometer and the side of my arm was 31C and my cheek was 34C, so a reading of 32C is fairly accurate.
  • ganeshts - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    Very much possible. Thank you very much for your feedback. I have updated the relevant section of the piece to refer to the obviously erroneous -13 C in the refrigerator compartment.
  • sor - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    Why is ice cream at -13C obviously erroneous? My freezer is set to -18C, and the solids in there are pretty close to that. I would expect the average freezer to be in the -10C to -15C (15 to 5F) range, unless we are talking about a crappy mini fridge/freezer combo.
  • sor - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    Oh, I see. You say your freezer is set to 0C, a setting that in practice probably doesn't even keep the contents frozen. In that case it IS off the mark.

    Sorry, most freezers I know of in the US have settings around 0F.
  • blue_urban_sky - Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - link

    It does look like you have something in the fridge at around 6 deg C which will kick on the cooling. I would imagine that it has a binary cooling system that is cycled to maintain the approximate temp. This may mean that -13 is not so far out.

    You could invest in a cheap thermometer from amazon ;)
  • pulse - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    "The pixel array in the microbolometer is usually encapsulated in a vacuum to increase the life of the device." this statement is half correct. Actually array has to be encapsulated in a vacuum or else the air will conduct heat and will prevent system to work as an imager. When you keep the sensor area under vacuum and connect it to read out circuit with very thin electrical connections you remove the conductive heat and let the sensor area heat up just with the radiative heat; hence the termal imager... It has nothing to do with longevity of the device. And also vanadium oxide is usually called as VOx in the industry instead of VO as many oxides of vanadium is showing thermal phase transition which is the physical basis of the system.
  • pureengineering - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link

    anyone interested is messing around with a thermal sensor should checkout the flir lepton sensor.
    http://www.pureengineering.com/projects/lepton

    in my unboxing I compare the seek vs the flir. and the flir comes out on top in terms of noise and image quality. http://www.pureengineering.com/blog/seekthermalcam...
  • aritai - Saturday, May 16, 2015 - link

    Someone should do the bench work comparing a range of cell-phone cameras after removing the IR filter (embedded in the covers) for each camera. And see just how well they do even with glass lenses. Especially in very dark (and cold) settings. I think we'll be surprised. I suspect purpose built cameras are needed only when there's a need to derive an actual temperature (not relative temp).
  • Wwhat - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link

    Look at replies to a few other comments here that confuse the two ranges of what we call IR.
    Or check wikipedia.

    To be short: the IR of normal camera sensors don't see radiated heat like thermo cameras do, it's a different frequency range.
    A list of related frequencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared#Commonly_us...
  • thermalEntusiast - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link

    can we buy this item if we live in asia? i thought this item is non exportable
  • Beoir - Saturday, June 20, 2015 - link

    Ahhhhh. Anyone happen to remember that the older cheaper Cameras used for photography can also see in the NIR?
    I've an old 3 MP camera that would probably do a better job. I'll sell it to you for 5 bucks.
  • FrancoB - Monday, August 31, 2015 - link

    nice gadget, for professional use i would probably look for one of the other devices available out there. like this one :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEImRa_zX-M

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