Best thermal camera for use in 3D printing?

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I’ve been on the fence about this for a while now, and I made the mistake of jumping on a cheap one, the MILESEEY TR10, during the Black Friday sales for $120. On paper the specs looked good, but upon receipt I was immediately underwhelmed by it.

In retrospect, the one that had looked most appealing was the Thermal Master T2 Pro with macro lens, which seems to produce better images. The macro lens would allow me to focus much closer and thereby get more detail that way. During Black Friday is was priced for, IIRC, around $230, and I mistakenly thought that was it’s everyday price. Today’s price, with the magnetic macro lens, is more like $299. I suppose I may just wait for that to go onsale again, and so that gives me time now to consider other options while I wait.

On the other hand, I recently came across the Seek Thermal CompactPro, which offers higher resolution, and by the magic of 3D printing can also be outfitted with macro lenses, as described here:

Currently selling for around $399, but it sometimes goes on sale for $199.

Anyone here have a favorite and/or found one they like? Without actually trying them out, I’m finding it a bit hard to sort out which are the best, or the best value for money. It’s not like regular cameras, where there are websites devoted to analyzing them and comparing them against one another, with all kinds of rigorous, standardized testing. Or maybe there do exist websites like that, and I just haven’t found a good one yet. There aren’t actually all that many on the market, so it seems like what should be a manageable topic with, perhaps, obvious winners that stand out from the pack.

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I have the compact pro and printed my own macro lens holder for a znse lens from aliexpress, it’s nice but way overpriced. Poke around eevblog for up-to-date selections.

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@mugglesmuggle In retrospect do you wish you had purchased something else (and, if so, what?), or would you make the same choice?

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I’m not unhappy with it, but it wasn’t a recent purchase. Unless I saw it on deep discount I wouldn’t purchase it again ($200 would be a good price!) without checking out all of the competition again. It has a a shutter-based recalibration so it is always clicking and I expect this greatly improves the performance but you might find it annoying. Over black friday I was thinking of trying to find something newer that had factory macro lenses so the calibration would be correct, but didn’t make much headway other than reading everything on eevblog. For PCB work I’ve got a close-focus IR thermometer anyway so the macro calibration isn’t really a blocker, it would just be a nice to have.

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@mugglesmuggle

I have no real experience to draw upon, so for me this is all a thought experiment. For instance, being chained to a macro lens that has a fixed focal length seems like it would be rather stifling. But is it really? Without the experience and therefore without really knowing, the idea of an adjustable focus macro lens, like the T2S Plus, sounds inherently more appealing, if only because more flexibility seems inherently more better:

Given that you do have experienced with the fixed focal kind, what are your thoughts on that? Is it a nice to have, a meh, or yet another thing that will mess with calibration?

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I know you mean “fixed focus” when you are saying “fixed focal length”, but just to clear it up a variable focal length lens is a zoom lens. Focus is just changing the lens-to-sensor distance, the focal length is still the same. My pro has adjustable focus and I’ve adjusted it for macro use, so I don’t think I’d buy another one without adjustable focus.

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Thanks, I guess I’ll head over there next.

As a total aside, I once posted a question on eevblog shortly after receiving my first oscilloscope and before I had any idea of what I was doing. I was impressed that not only did Dave Jones almost immediately post a video response to answer my question, but in the written forum he also came to my defense against the toxic trolls who were roasting me over it:

And now that youtube has had over a hundred thousand views! Nice to see that good things happen to people who do good. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It may be hard to find anything other than fixed focal length in lower price ranges. The lenses are special materials and themselves expensive.

I got the Hikmicro IR camera and it’s been great. It has a regular camera and does an image fusion so you see the IR image with white light image around it for context. Others probably do similar and that’s a very handy feature.

Don’t know how it compares with others, though.

HIKMICRO B10 Thermal Camera 256 x 192 IR Resolution with 2MP Visual Camera

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That’s a great story!

Let me know if you find a new IR camera you like.

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I think I’ve decided against the compaqpro. Even though it has more native pixels, the thermal sensitivity isn’t as good as either the T2S Pro or the P2 Pro. And it appears to make a visible difference. For anyone who pines after a compaqpro, though, here’s a tip: you can buy one for $199 on the seek website with a higher than typical framerate… assuming you’re willing to accept a micro-usb connection. That’s not as bad as it sounds, though, because you can buy an adapter for $5 that converts usb-on-the-go micro-usb to usb-c, which is what I would have done if I had gone that way. So, for $199 + $5 you’re getting the equivalent of the usb-c version that would cost you $479 on amazon. That’s quite a big discount!

I had thought the pace of innovation in thermal cameras would be fast (like most things these days), but the the models on offer seem to mostly be designs from at least a couple years ago. So it should be easy, right? Well, not so, as a lot of the reviews aren’t crisp or avoid comparisons and generally just meander all over the place while containing heaps of irrelevant observations, or the reviewer’s life story. Basically noise.

The other bit of noise that I think I’ve maybe now resolved: there’s no meaningful difference between Infiray and Thermal Masters. If you’ve narrowed your list to just those two, I’m not aware of it making any difference which you pick. It’s like picking between Eco-Worthy or DCHouse for a lifepo4 battery: they’re essentially the same company.

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OK, I’ve boiled it down to either the Topdon TC001 Plus or the Infriray P2 Pro+ with matching magnetic macro lens. Street price is about the same for either.

The specs also appear to be about the same, except that the TC001 Plus offers image fusion (which @MZip seems to like in his thermal camera) but no obvious way to add a macro lens, and the P2 Pro+ comes with a perfectly mating macro lens but no way to add real-time image fusion.

I knocked out the T2S+ from consideration because its datasheet reports a higher thermal sensitivity of m60k. On the other hand, I’m not sure how real the <m40K NETD claimed by Infriray is, because at least one other vendor appears to sell the exact same P2 Pro+ model but only claims <m50K for it, not <m40K.

Which is now a sore spot for me, because MILESEEY claimed a <m40k sensitivity for the TR10, but after receiving it, I find that hard to believe (as I mentioned in my OG post above)–though I’m unsure how to test that except maybe by direct comparison with some other thermal camera that frames the exact same scene.

The Topdon TC001 Plus does offer Windows connectivity in addition to android, and I suppose that might make collecting some kind of timelapse thermal imaging over a long period a little easier but, meh, I suppose I could run android in a VM on a PC for the P2 Pro+, so I could maybe get the same doing it that way at the cost of some extra hassle. I do think it might be helpful to monitor the evolving thermal image of a 3D print as it gets printed. It might give some extra insights to troubleshoot warping, for example. On the other hand, IIRC, infrared doesn’t travel well through glass, so that would maybe require the camera inside the build chamber, which would probably shoot the thermal noise through the roof (and maybe explains why I’ve never seen anyone do this).

So… for me, I guess the P2 Pro+ combo wins, as I’ll at least maximize collection of thermal data. The image fusion would have been fun to have though.

The only thing more attractive would be better thermal sensitivity, but as near as I can tell, anthing that’s <m35k or <m30k is already in the multiple thousands of dollars, so outside the sweet spot–for now.

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OK, so to answer your request: for simplicity sake, I ended up ordered the P2 Pro+ combo that includes the macro lens. I ordered it brand new from a seller on ebay for either the same or maybe slightly less than the black friday price. They’re sending it using the cheapest USPS, though, so it may take a while for it to arrive. I don’t yet know how much of a difference it will make, but I plan to return the TR10, since, IMHO, it underperformed relative to its stated specs. I guess one always takes a bit of risk in that regard when ordering from some obscure brand, and this instance seems to prove the rule. Actually, other than FLIR, most of the brands seem somewhat obscure, so it’s like comparing relative degrees of obscurity. :upside_down_face: