Talk:Thermographic camera

Additional Proposal to Change Article:

FLIR - Forward Looking Infrared Cameras are military infrared systems designed to look down and forward (generally from aircraft). As Such, I am removing the first reference to Flir.

http://www.militaryinfrared.com/

FLIR is also a brand name of camera, as is Fluke. These are two of the most common ones. I believe the author who wrote that FLIR cameras are essentially the same as infrared cameras has this counfusion as a result of this.

I am a Nachi-Certified Infrared Inspector and use the Fluke TI-32 for most applications. Feel free to hit me up on my talk page to ask for images. I am more than happy to either upload ones I already have, or take ones specifically for this article.

CincyBuyers (talk) 03:19, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Proposal to change article:

There is a need to clarify the difference between Thermal camera and Infrared cameras. Thermal cameras being far infrared and useful in measuring temperature differences, and near infrared being nightvision and cameras working on IR LED illumination. Perhaps a disambiguation page with a link to a near infrared article and another linking to far infrared article or perhaps a change of this article to two sections? I hesitate to make the change myself since the authors of this page obviously know more about the subject than myself but still i feel the ambiguity is too great in this article in its current form and is limiting the articles use in imparting knowlege of the subjects two distinct realms. —Preceding unsigned comment added by windkin (talk • contribs) 17:13, 26 May 2005


 * I agree completely, as a result I decided to be bold and rename the article to thermographic camera. The existing article seems to confuse near and far infrared seeing but focus mostly on far, I'll make a quick pass to remove more of the near IR stuff and it can grow from there. Gmaxwell 15:40, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Should this get mergded with FLIR?---User:Rayc
 * Yes! --Gmaxwell 07:52, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

But is there a separate article on near infrared cameras for nightvision? And isn't the link at the bottom for more information on other applications purely commercial?--shtove 21:23, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, Infrared_photography, Image_intensifier, and Night vision. Feel free to clean it up. The whole subject area is a bit messy. --Gmaxwell 22:29, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

All the infrared pages are quite a mess with a lot of miss-information and half-truths. I would recommend that firstly there must be an basic Infrared page, then all the other pages leading from that one. Here some of the basics: The infarred (IR) radiation occurs between 0.78um to 1000um (not 14um as in most pages). There is a lot of debate among scholars about the division of the IR spectrum. The most popular being accordong to sensor sensitivity: Near infrared(NIR)             0.78um - 1um Short Wavelength IR (SWIR)     1um - 3um Medium Wavelength IR (MWIR)    3um - 6um Long Wavelength IR (LWIR)      6um - 15um (also referred to alot of the time as the thermal band) Very Long Wavelength IR (VLWIR) 15um - 1000um Pranksta 09:20, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

It would be useful to have examples of how much these devices cost and where they are sold.

Dog Picture
Can we get a new picture? That one just freaks me out. Also, I'm not easily freaked out, so I can't imagine how old people feel about that satanic dog on the top of the page. 68.143.88.2 18:11, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I totally agree. I just came to this discussion page to post that. 99.233.49.126 (talk) 21:29, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Any furry animal with his eyes open in a thermal image will have the same spooky look. The eyes, mouth and ears are losing heat faster than the furred parts of the face. I think it is illustrative and appropriate. Rhodesh (talk) 01:51, 3 June 2009 (UTC) yes The picture should be changed —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.64.67.186 (talk) 03:07, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

IR Sensor
Why IR Sensor redirects here? Most of IR Sensor are not used in cameras!M.Campos (talk) 22:34, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Thermographer training and certification
This whole section reads like an ad. Is there any reason for its inclusion? The information is only tangentially related to thermal imaging. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii (talk • contribs) 03:32, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Ghost Hunting
I made some changes to this section for factual errors and clarity. I changed "every episode of Ghost Hunters and other paranormal programs" to "Some episodes of Ghost Hunters and other paranormal programs" because the thermal camera is not used in every episode of Ghost Hunters (much less every other paranormal program ever aired, as implied). While the findings in nearly all of those episaodes cannot be proven to be anything but false positives, they also haven't been proven not to be. In the spirit of the fact that (from a strictly scientific perspective) they are likely to be false positives, I kept that language in. I also linked to the wikipedia article on false positives. --AnalogWeapon (talk) 16:35, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

This section should be removed. It has no business on a technical article about Infared detection —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.166.144.40 (talk) 06:38, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Can a normal digital camera be rebuilt into a thermographic camera?
Can a normal visible-light digital camera with a charge coupled device be modified to function as a low-cost amateur temperature sensing heat-field camera?

This question is mainly due to the fact that big-name companies like FLIR charge ridiculous sums of money for low resolution professional thermographic camera systems. Woohoo, $20,000 for a "FLIR T620" 640x480 thermographic camera:
 * http://www.google.com/search?q=FLIR+T620

I have seen several types of standard CCD camera modifications explored separately on the web. Can these be combined to achieve amateur IR thermographic imaging at low cost?

1. Give basic IR detection capability to a standard CCD camera by removing a manufactuer-installed IR filter over the CCD, and installing a visible-light filter over the lens:
 * http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/d70/ircut.htm

2. A homemade CCD chiller using dry ice, for DSLR astronomy photographs with less noise, would also improve CCD sensitivity to ambient IR. Normal CCD sensitivity keeps improving when chilled down to about -170 C before performance declines again, and dry ice sublimates at -70 C so this allows for easy amateur low-temperature regulation:
 * http://www.aznightsky.com/dryicecoldbox.htm

4. Canon cameras can be hacked and reprogrammed to do things never intended by the manufacturer, with the Canon hack development kit (CHDK). Is thermographic imaging possible just by using new programming to read the CCD differently?
 * http://chdk.wikia.com

Also, refrigeration systems mainly work by creating a temperature depression relative to ambient, and peltier coolers can easily manage about 30 C temperature difference, plus it is solid state device with no specific operating range like pressure-based refrigerants, so a peltier removing heat from a CCD, and transferring the heat to sublimating dry ice should allow amateur cooling to -100 C with not much cost.

- Dale Mahalko - DMahalko (talk) 11:49, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Flir One
I was wondering whether the Flir One could be mentioned ? It is a camera that can be fitted to a smartphone, and is very, very cheap, at least for this type of camera. See www.flir.com/flirone/