FLIR One Edge Pro Review: Thermal Images and Videos From Any Phone

Are you a zebra fish? If not, you’re lacking out on one thing: the power to see infrared mild, the thermal radiation past the scope of human imaginative and prescient given off by all the things round you.

Fortunately for these with out the Cyp27c1 enzyme that permits zebra fish to see infrared mild, thermal cameras—just like the $550 FLIR One Edge Pro—can seize in any other case invisible infrared mild, and in doing so present us how heat or cool the issues round us are. That’s a helpful trick for plenty of causes: Zebra fish can see meals at the hours of darkness, owners can see the place the warmth is escaping from their homes, and I can see the place my canine is within the yard at 3 am on a chilly evening. 

Many thermal cameras can be found that plug into your smartphone; I reviewed a number of in our latest roundup. The FLIR One Edge Pro is totally different, as a result of it makes use of Wi-Fi to hook up with your telephone. That means it doesn’t should be bodily plugged into your telephone and even located close by. My Samsung Fold 4 may connect with the ad-hoc Wi-Fi community that the FLIR One Edge Pro created as much as a distance of about 20 toes. Since the telephone and digicam can function independently, it is a lot simpler to look into confined or hard-to-reach areas with out worrying about dropping the costly telephone your digicam is tethered to. However, at $550, the One Edge Pro may cost as a lot as your telephone.

Bring the Heat

The FLIR One Edge Pro is a tall and skinny module, just below 6 inches lengthy and about 1.5 inches extensive. It is formed like a C clamp, with a spring-loaded high arm that clamps onto your telephone’s again. This design seems to be a bit wack, nevertheless it works: It fitted onto a number of Samsung and Apple iPhones, with and with out instances.

The system fees via the USB-C port on the aspect, and a single button on the entrance turns the digicam on. The FLIR One app controls all the things else. Near the highest of the physique are two cameras: a 160- by 120-pixel infrared digicam and a 640- by 480-pixel seen mild digicam. In commonplace lighting, the photographs from the 2 cameras are mixed to offer you an image with the invisible element of the thermal picture overlaid on high of the seen mild picture; a course of FLIR provides the slightly grandiose title of Multi-Spectral Dynamic Imaging. These dynamic visuals may be saved as 640- by 480-pixel photographs or as a video that runs at about 9 frames per second—slightly uneven, nevertheless it’s a restrict imposed by the US authorities on expertise that is perhaps exported.

The FLIR One Edge Pro can measure temperatures wherever between -4 and 752 levels Fahrenheit via two switchable ranges, one that may see temps from -4 to 248 levels Fahrenheit and a second that may see from 32 to 752 levels Fahrenheit. In each ranges, the colour scheme of the captured picture may be modified, however the default makes use of the colours you’d usually see when an infrared digicam is used on a TV present: Cold objects are blue, and heat objects are pink.

The digicam’s default setting combines photos from each cameras, so you’ll be able to see an “outline” of a real-world object coloured in with the temperature data. You can select to view simply the IR or seen mild photos. These settings may be chosen within the FLIR One app, which is offered for iOS and Android. This app controls the digicam and retains a library of saved photos and video; no information is saved on the digicam itself. This easy-to-use app permits you to management how the sensors’ temperature measurements are displayed within the photos and movies, both by marking the most well liked and coldest spots with crosshairs or setting as much as three spots within the picture to be constantly measured, which is very helpful in video mode.

When clipped onto my Samsung Fold 4, the FLIR One Edge Pro stayed firmly in place, nevertheless it felt prefer it may slip off at an inopportune second. I discovered myself instinctively protecting a agency maintain on each the digicam and the telephone.

Working with the digicam indifferent from the telephone, the FLIR One Edge Pro feels very comfy. It is straightforward to carry in a single hand and transfer nearer to look at a warmth supply with the telephone within the different hand. I’d have preferred a tripod socket on the underside of the digicam module to make it simpler to connect to issues with a versatile tripod just like the Joby Gorillapod. That would make it simpler to observe the temperature of one thing over an extended time period.