Why are even Chinese thermal cams not a lot cheaper than FLIRs?

[Bassman59]

It may be that the thermal image sensor is significantly more expensive to produce than a visible light sensor, but I can assure you that thermal image sensors are not 100x as expensive to manufacture as visible light sensors. Same thing with the lenses.

If you can assure us, then please, by all means, provide evidence to back up your assurance.

And you do know that a camera is more than just the image sensor, right?

[Ben321]

By my estimate, the price to buy for a thermal camera of a given resolution is about 100x what a visible light CMOS camera of the same resolution costs. Is the cost of the manufacturing process for a thermal cam actually 100x what it costs to make a visible light CMOS camera of the same resolution? Or are the companies selling thermal cams just making more obscene profits than the companies selling visible light CMOS cameras?

Same answer as every time you ask this question...... yes that is where the cost is at.

Typical phone level sensor is 1.5 um pixels
Thermal camera 12um pixels

80x less sensors per per wafer for the same pixel size
Then add in the complications of fab for bolometers (3D structure)
Then add in the poor yield for bolometers (because of the 3D structure)
Then add in the vacuum packaging needed for TIC
Then add in the lens and flag costs
Then add in the calibrations needed for TIC
Then add in the higher support electronics needed vs a one chip CMOS
Finally you have the lower production to recover design costs in hardware and software.

It may be that the thermal image sensor is significantly more expensive to produce than a visible light sensor, but I can assure you that thermal image sensors are not 100x as expensive to manufacture as visible light sensors. Same thing with the lenses.

My suspicion is that while the they are more expensive to produce (and this should naturally increase the cost somewhat), the reason that they are being sold as expensively as they are right now also is due to price gouging (charging so much more than it costs to manufacture, to the point that the company is basically robbing its customers).

I'm guessing that the actual manufacturing costs for a 640x480 thermal imager core, are probably actually somewhere between $500 and $1000. Possibly even less than $500.

Which core / sensor manufacturing facilities have you visited and performed open book costing on ?

As for manufacturing costs, $1500 is probably close as that implies a typical profit margin of 50% on $3000 one-off sale price.  In 1000+ off you might get down to $2000 a core.

That added $1500 (or $500) has to cover sales, marketing, shipping, returns, support, equipment amortisation, R&D amortisation, corporate admin and finally hope to leave a little bit of profit (whether for shareholders or for the Chinese Communist Party)

Marketing is very expensive. Yes. But I'm guessing when you take into account the number of cams sold, and divide the price for overall marketing by the number of cameras, the "per camera marketing" isn't anywhere near as expensive as the camera itself. As for shipping, that's typically listed separately as a "shipping fee", at least on every online store I've seen. It's not built into the price of the product itself. Product support and all other company expenses are also probably expensive, but due to the shear number of devices sold, dividing that overall price for running the company by the number of devices sold, is going add only a small amount to the price of each unit of the device in question. I think the vast majority (probably at least 75% to 90%) of the money made per sale of thermal cameras, is profit, and goes straight into the corporate bank accounts of the companies making the cameras. At least that's my hunch based on my own estimates of the various costs involved.

I see this as another example of the problem with corporate greed. And it makes me wish that there was some company out there who would make the mission to provide cheap alternatives to expensive products like this, so that the average person could get their hands on some really cool tech, that would otherwise be unavoidable to the average person if they were to buy it from any other company.

[Ben321]

What do you need such high resolution in a thermal image for? High resolution is useful for visible light cameras, but a thermal camera is an entirely different beast.

To get cool pics in a size that the average person could appreciate, after I post said images online (think posting cool pics to social media). Most people aren't going to want to need to get their face close to the screen to see detail in an image. They want to sit at comfortable distance to view the pics. I'd say that 640x480 is about the smallest size of picture that would be considered reasonable size to the average person. If I got some pics I considered awesome (awesome because they were thermal pics, and not normal pics like most people have) around my neighborhood, and wanted to share them on the socials, I think that most people would laugh if I posted something with 320x240 resolution, because that's so low res. Not exactly a social media worthy resolution at 320x240. Now at 640x480 that's different. I would probably get quite a few more views of my pics if I posted them in that resolution. Yes I can upscale them to 640x480, but that's fake and doesn't actually bring out any extra detail in the image, and in fact too much upscaling can make the picture look blurry.

[Ben321]

It may be that the thermal image sensor is significantly more expensive to produce than a visible light sensor, but I can assure you that thermal image sensors are not 100x as expensive to manufacture as visible light sensors. Same thing with the lenses.

If you can assure us, then please, by all means, provide evidence to back up your assurance.

And you do know that a camera is more than just the image sensor, right?

Yep. Surrounding electronics too. But those probably aren't too different from the average visible light camera.
And of course a lens. Again, my hunch is that germanium isn't too much more difficult to get or work with than glass, but because it happens to be being used in an exotic application, the company accountant is like "Oh this is science equipment, so we can way overcharge for it, because science equipment is supposed to be expensive", and that gives them an excuse to overcharge for it to the point of making an obscene profit, instead of charging an amount that would generate merely a reasonable amount of profit.

[Ben321]

The real question is why are even Chinese companies, which are KNOWN to sell stuff MUCH cheaper than US counterparts, actually not selling 640x480 thermal cams cheaper than FLIR does? Is there some kind of illegal price fixing going on in the thermal camera industry worldwide (or as another poster here called it, a "cartel")? Like is there some kind of international agreement between all thermal camera companies in the world (even in China), to not charge less than about $3000 for a 640x480 thermal camera?

[Bill W]

I see this as another example of the problem with corporate greed. And it makes me wish that there was some company out there who would make the mission to provide cheap alternatives to expensive products like this, so that the average person could get their hands on some really cool tech, that would otherwise be unavoidable to the average person if they were to buy it from any other company.

There is, it is called SEEK.
For historical reasons they would be delighted to wipe out FLIR and the Chinese of they could.  The owners do not need excess profits.  No way would they be in collusion.
That they cannot is the biggest indicator that your presumptions are all

[Bill W]

Marketing is very expensive. Yes. But I'm guessing when you take into account the number of cams sold, and divide the price for overall marketing by the number of cameras, the "per camera marketing" isn't anywhere near as expensive as the camera itself.

Not that simple. 
Advertising to a small market is cheap.  Not that many customers to go at, good coverage of relevant people by specialist media.
Wide scale 'blunderbuss' marketing (eg TV, general media) is expensive and inefficient.
As such you cannot simply lump it into 'marketing per camera'

Equally sales support, running a week long training camp for someone who will buy 10,000 sensors is worth the time and facility invested. 
The same for 'Ben321 Industries' with maximum sales of 1 is not worth it, or adds 10,000 to the price.

[Vipitis]

Again, you shown how little you understand about economics or product development in general, the electronics involved in the integrated readout circuit (yes they are much more complex than CIS) or chemistry. Germanium is nothing like glass at all. You can't mould Germanium. It's a single grown crystal that's cut and machined down to optical shapes. It's more similar to silicon and goes through some of the same processing steps for growing the ingot.

It might also be of interest that SEEK is not a Chinese offering at all, there are threads about the companies origin and history but as far as I know, the sensors are made by Raytheon - in the United States.

There is no international cartel but for DoD contracts there is a bunch of lobbying, do prices will be inflated and probably fund some executes of senators which is just part of the US military complex. However consumer goods prices are very much dictated by supply and demand. The US being hindered by regulations does add to this as well.

Finally, the idea that 640x480 looks a lot better than 384x288 is also misguided. If you are using a lens that can resolve such tiny pixels and get the image processing to get useable results in the end. you can become a published and exhibiting artist with less than VGA resolution. If you were motivated enough you would also find methods with stacking, stiching and processing to end up with useable results. Or make the limited pixel resolution part of your look. Every visible light image you see is 'upscaled' as well in the debayering process, which also means a QVGA thermal camera does look as good as a VGA sized Bayer visible light camera.


All your claims are based on 'I believe' or 'I think' - read the reports I liked from Yole and see how they predict consumer devices to drop in price and rise in resolution.

[ArsenioDev]

 

Like is there some kind of international agreement between all thermal camera companies in the world (even in China), to not charge less than about $3000 for a 640x480 thermal camera?

That's the thing, I got quotes for the latest gen VGA cores from several chinese manufacturers and they're about 1.7K with a pretty good lens on em, if you know where to look on the used market you can score VGA for WELL under a grand these days, I myself have a very nice VGA core I paid only about $650 for and have full documentation on it (That's the gold there).
Lenses for higher resolution imaging get expensive due to the more complex optical paths and more elements required so of course prices will go up, I think OP doesn't quite grok the thermal market and inherently exponentially more expensive tech than standard CMOS vis band imaging.

[cdev]

The arms industry is huge and unless they are boycotted (which maybe against WTO rules, as long as their money is good, any state, including the Russians can quite possibly buy whatever they can pay for. I dopnt know where it stands now. Does anybody? I dont think they are deemed a terrorist by the WTO. Which means I suspect they may be able to replace all the thermal imagers they can pay for. As long as they have money to pay whats demanded, whatever it is. Of course many countries would like to hide the human rights agnostic aspect of world trade. Permanent Normal Trade Relations, and WTO membership, boycotts of any WTO members products, generally, for any reason, are more or less prohibited. But this may be changing, very gradually. It kind of has to, minimally, in response to the public, who learn things like this very very very gradually.

Its a contentious issue for sure. But WTO makes sure that commerce always wins. Sometimes that is preferable. It certainly is for electronics manufacturers, I suspect.

Thats the whole point of the WTO. Stopping boycotts like the one that ended apartheid from inhibiting business.. including the lucrative arms business.. One of the most profitable of businesses.

This is a chapter from an entire free book, written by Sarah Joseph, which you can find onine, its worth reading..

I see this as another example of the problem with corporate greed. And it makes me wish that there was some company out there who would make the mission to provide cheap alternatives to expensive products like this, so that the average person could get their hands on some really cool tech, that would otherwise be unavoidable to the average person if they were to buy it from any other company.

There is, it is called SEEK.
For historical reasons they would be delighted to wipe out FLIR and the Chinese of they could.  The owners do not need excess profits.  No way would they be in collusion.
That they cannot is the biggest indicator that your presumptions are all

[cdev]

What is the situation with thermal imaging equipment and ukraine?

I am generally against wars but realize that much of what rankles me may not technically be illegal or benefit from regulatory attention. Suppose I did want to report "illegal" activity if I saw it, what would/should I report and to whom?

I am not talking about "cheap" thermal imaging which I generally would think positively about as long as it wasn't going to feed the Russian war machine in Ukraine. (or similar things)

What I would envision reporting would be hardware that might be used by terrorists or countries committing crimes against innocent people.

[james_s]

To get cool pics in a size that the average person could appreciate, after I post said images online (think posting cool pics to social media). Most people aren't going to want to need to get their face close to the screen to see detail in an image. They want to sit at comfortable distance to view the pics. I'd say that 640x480 is about the smallest size of picture that would be considered reasonable size to the average person. If I got some pics I considered awesome (awesome because they were thermal pics, and not normal pics like most people have) around my neighborhood, and wanted to share them on the socials, I think that most people would laugh if I posted something with 320x240 resolution, because that's so low res. Not exactly a social media worthy resolution at 320x240. Now at 640x480 that's different. I would probably get quite a few more views of my pics if I posted them in that resolution. Yes I can upscale them to 640x480, but that's fake and doesn't actually bring out any extra detail in the image, and in fact too much upscaling can make the picture look blurry.

I challenge you to find me 10 people who want to buy a high resolution thermal camera to post "cool" pics to post on social media, much less the tens of thousands of people that are required to start to drive down the cost. Once again you are taking your own personal obsession and projecting it on the general population. I assure you, the VAST majority of ordinary people out there don't give a crap about thermal images, and 99% of them are not going to notice the difference between a 320x240 image that has been upscaled and a 640x480 native image. You seem to want a thermal camera as a toy, they are not toys and it is completely absurd to expect a manufacture to cater to this extremely niche use. It's like demanding a 7 digit multimeter to take "cool" measurements and post them online, a handful of voltnuts might find that fascinating but most people are not going to care, and the vast majority of hobbyists see no compelling need for such a precise instrument.

You keep bitching and moaning about "greed" while making baseless assertions of some mass market desire for a very niche item and making comparisons to a completely different and extremely mainstream item that almost everyone owns. Having unusual interests is fine, I've been obsessed with light bulbs and engines my entire life but I am self aware that my obsessive interests are weird and not shared by the vast majority of people in the world, you have apparently not reached this self awareness. Even if thermal cameras cost exactly the same as visible light cameras, I'd wager no more than 0.01% of the population would be interested in buying one. Most people simply do not care, once you've seen a handful of thermal images you've seen them all.

[Bill W]

What is the situation with thermal imaging equipment and ukraine?

I am generally against wars but realize that much of what rankles me may not technically be illegal or benefit from regulatory attention. Suppose I did want to report "illegal" activity if I saw it, what would/should I report and to whom?

You contact the export control department of the state from which you believe that the 'questionable' export is being made.

May be worth adding that while a '<9Hz' imager is not controlled by Wassenaar etc, the state level embargoes such as those generally (US, UK, EU27) in place on Russia and Belarus take precedence.  No <9Hz or even spares to RUS/BLR.

Ukrainian Government controlled Ukraine territory is still (UK) on normal export rules, one suspects that any requested licenses are being readily granted.

[james_s]

But none of those applications really need exceptionally high resolution. 320x240 is high resolution in terms of thermal images.

[Bill W]

But none of those applications really need exceptionally high resolution. 320x240 is high resolution in terms of thermal images.

Indeed there is an argument that thermal, at low resolution, is better for some surveillance tasks as it cannot 'identify' the target, so satisfying data privacy concerns.

One odd aspect to me is that thermal is still coming out in 4:3 ratio.  A 640x240 sensor would be half the price of a 640x480 but nearly as useful for surface based uses.
Even historically few sensors have come in 'wide' formats, yes BST had a 320x120 option for vehicle use, but it was on a full 320x240 sensor.  There was the BAe (UK, ex-Plessey) 256x128 though.

[bap2703]

Did anyone add to the price conspiracy that we might be getting only the low end of binned devices rejected from military use?

[Bill W]

Did anyone add to the price conspiracy that we might be getting only the low end of binned devices rejected from military use?

At least for western suppliers their binned devices with zero defects (A), or zero central defects (B) will either cost more, or a lot more, depending on the whole process yield.

Those suppliers with a relatively small military customer base do supply zero defects at the commercial price, as they have more than they can sell at grade A.  Sometimes you just get lucky.

Why would China be any different ?

Bill

[james_s]

I would think most surveillance applications would benefit from higher resolution than 320x200, actually even higher than VGA would be ideal but of course 320x200 is a valid starting point but if (like NIR/VIS sensors) the incremental cost for VGA, HD, FHD, UHD could end up to be small enough then I'm 100% sure a lot of the mass surveillance market would select the higher resolution chips.

More resolution is always nice, but I'm not convinced that there's a huge benefit even for surveillance. A thermal image is good for identifying that there's something there, but you're not going to be able to see for example a person's face. A thermal sensor paired with a high resolution visible image sensor can provide a nice compromise, overlaying the thermal image over the top of the visible light image similar to the way the chroma bandwidth of a VHS recording is only about half that of the luminance bandwidth. In practice you don't really notice that the resolution of the color is so much lower than that of the base image.

[Microdoser]

You seem to think that I am talking about integrating it into a phone. I am talking about using it as a USB dongle on the phone (like the FLIR One, and Seek Compact Pro).

I'm not though.

You seem to think that an IR sensor should cost exactly the same as the visible light one in your phone or webcam, though, even when the reasons why this cannot be done are repeatedly explained to you.

I think OP doesn't quite grok the thermal market and inherently exponentially more expensive tech than standard CMOS vis band imaging.

This is what I think also.

[bap2703]

Chinese aggressive marketing isn't stereotype though

[polar]

Chinese aggressive marketing isn't stereotype though

 

[cdev]

Military.
UK is heavily invested in the military (Arms) Industry.
especially sales to developing world oligarchs, etc. .
This is absolutely huge in the UK, or so I keep being told.

Its what the money from all that African oil goes to pay for, more guns..helicopters, missiles, rockets

More wars, more moolah...

[All Seeing Eye]

1920x1280 are already products of chinese IRAY,but the price is not affordable to ordinary users.

[Vipitis]

does that 1920x1280 sensor exists in any products? Or is it just a press release.

The 1920x1200 sensor from Fairchild does actually exist and is available as the Vayu HD from Sierra Olympic or for the BAE DVR for tanks... Which isn't that available I guess