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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

What's good for thermal cameras these days? There is some cheaper stuff iirc but in general the resolutions are just kinda sad (32x32 or 64x64) unless you go to expensive gear. And even then it's like, 256x256, not exactly the 64-100+ megapixels we get in traditional photography. I know you don't really need it but it's nice to have good gear.

iirc some of the phone stuff was like a couple hundred bucks, which is definitely within toy-money range and I'd get some use out of that even with lower resolution. Anything notably great for, say, under $2-3k that'd be worth jumping to over something basic? That's not a number that I'm unaccustomed to with higher-end photography stuff if it's worth the spend.

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I've been researching this recently because every time I need to use my FLIR One, it's annoying because I need to find it, charge it, plug it in, and use FLIR's awful software. In the last few years, a Chinese company started selling sensors that seem to be far superior to anything you can get for reasonable prices from FLIR (256x192, and 25Hz since they're not subject to American export controls). I've been looking into buying a Android phone with one of their sensors built in as a replacement, because it seems to have a lot of advantages:

- not needing to futz with a dongle, way better displays than the standalone camera options

- never needing to charge it if you leave it on a wireless charging pad

- lots of internal storage that can automatically sync captured videos/pictures to the cloud

There's tons of options that look great in the $300-$500 range, which is a problem because it makes choosing difficult. This review has me leaning towards getting either a Doogee S98 Pro ($270), or a V20 Pro ($330, newer and has better specifications across the board except for not having wireless charging, so I'd need to get a wireless charging adapter for it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4002_MqVNfY

Its been a little while since I looked at these sensors myself, and if love to know the name of that Chinese company or the name of their line of sensors if that’s easier, so I can search searching for devices using their sensors and even the sensors directly. I’m sure I’ll find them eventually but it’s so hard to search for some Chinese suppliers like this because of the garbage pile of inaccurate product descriptions on sites like AliExpress polluting the search results that basically turns finding a part into a game of cross referencing the effort of sifting through a garbage pile.

Whoops, forgot to mention the name. The company making the sensors is InfiRay. Doogee doesn't even have a product listing for the V20 Pro on their website currently, although you can find one on archive.org that says they're using the Tiny1-C sensor from InfiRay: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601144956/https://doogee.cc...

I searched AliExpress for Android phones with thermal cameras, narrowed it down to three brands (Doogee, Blackview, ulefone), eliminated Blackview because all of their product listings proudly mention that the thermal cameras are by FLIR, and then opened a bunch of tabs to compare specs and search YouTube for review videos that seemed like they weren't paid for. The video I linked above in my comment is from a prominent electronics YouTuber who explicitly states that he bought it on his own and I found another video comparing the FLIR One Pro and S98 Pro that looked promising (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ7NJPvPsk0), which is why I'm deciding between the two options from Doogee now.

Depends on what you need it for but I have a ten year old FLIR i3 with 64x64 pixels. It’s fine but the feature I would really like is that newer modules have both a normal camera and a thermal camera and they overlay the color image and the thermal image. That makes dealing with the low thermal resolution WAY easier since you can actually see which thing is hot. If you have a bunch of similar shaped chips on a board and all you can see is some rectangle is hot, it takes a moment to figure out which one you’re looking at. (I do this by covering each chip with my finger and seeing when the image is occluded).

So you don’t really need high resolution for most stuff if you have the color image overlay. I haven’t shopped for them in the last ten years before those types were common so I don’t have a specific part to recommend.

The thing is they are a fun toy but sometimes I question whether I should have spent $1500 on mine. I would suggest going on the cheaper end, not chasing specs for no reason, and just get the value out of it without breaking the bank. They’re neat but for my use case I’ve never felt like I really needed to have it. If there’s something that’s $300 go for it.

I don't have any PCB shots but I have some sample ikages from a cheap Noyafa which does 160x120 on my blog. The next model up (also much cheaper than FLIR equivalents) claims double resolution at 256x192

https://bbrks.me/noyafa-nf-583-review/

I have used a FLIR TG267 at work to find if parts are failing and while it's only 120x160 it works pretty well because it can overlay thermal coloration over a standard camera which really lets you use those pixels for temperature not identification.

This lets you know "ah this transistor is dead" instead of "what I am I even looking at".

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