cute little thermal imager

Another review here:

Seems an expensive and limited device. I have a Seek Thermal Reveal (USD 399) which is hand-held and very useful. They have a higher resolution version available now at USD 699.

It would be very awkward to have to use a stand when the PCB is in an enclosure and too big to fit on the stand. You need to be able to move it around easily.

The hand-held device is also useful for household things - recently to confirm that a damp patch was new and not historic. The small amount of cooling due to evaporation showed up easily but couldn't be felt by hand.

It also sees through plastic bin-liners which may be useful in certain fancy-dress party situations. And it's fun to see where your thermal hand pint on the desk for a few seconds.

I don't know anything about the companies involved, by my narrative would be that FLIR were comfortable in their market niche until Seek Thermal arrived, now they're desperately trying to add value to a product to compete. Unfortunately, the Marketing department has overruled engineering.

Cheers

We have an inexpensive little handheld FLIR, looks like a small cell phone, and a giant expensive E45 with a fabulous germanium lens. This new one is handy for electronics testing; you can take multiple registered images for comparison, without handheld position jiggling.

We got the handheld and the new ETS320 for free, for being beta testers, so there's really no downside to either one. The E45 cost something like $12K about 10 years ago, but it's still the best. It will focus on the hot spot of an 0603 resistor.

Thermal imagers are great for engineering and production test.