Seek Thermal - Android Infrared Camera Review
by Ganesh T S on May 1, 2015 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Gadgets
- Thermal Imaging
- Seek Thermal
Sample Thermal Images
A number of comments have come in with requests for thermal image samples taken by the Seek Thermal camera in day-to-day circumstances. A few cases are provided below. It can be seen that the temperature is not very accurate - for example, the temperature of a component in the refrigerator is reported as -13 C, when the compartment is set to be at 0 C. Also, the skin temperature is reported to be around 32 C, when it is obviously around 37 C (updated: see comments section).
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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 resolutionhammer256 - 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.