I have a HIKMICRO B20 since a week. My main area of application is to measure the
leaf temperature of orchids in order to be able to recognize stress in advance and counteract before it becomes visible - which is usually too late. Orchids grow very slowly so an
early warning system is a good idea. I've read about it in various studies. But I'm not quite sure yet if I can get any practical use out of it.
I need a thermal camera for thermography (measurement), not for thermo-photography like outdoor hunters. But my budget is limited. At first I thought it should be between 500€ to max. 1.000€. But now after examing the whole field I guess I had to adjust my budget a bit to reality and now it should be no more than 2.500€ which is already big buck for my type of usage. But since you can use it also sometimes in the household (though not regularly) it could pay for itself.
Otherwise I have done the natural fun with the device first since this is my first thermal camera and I have to familiarize myself with this measurement technique:
- check underfloor heating
- get to the bottom of the black spot on the wall above the fridge
- fever measurement on people (see vid from FLIR below)
- moisture measurements on surfaces
- look at the PCB of my fanless PC (and wonder how hot some components can get there)
I planned to check my fanless PC since two years ago with a thermal camera when I build it because I was unsure how good it would be for the components without airflow due to the lack of fans in my PC. Well, some chips do get very hot in the process contrary to what the manufacturer of the fanless case stated.
I was also very amazed to see how big the temperature differ between an orchid leaf and the soaking wet moss underneath which can be up to 6°C lower due to evaporation.
On the subject of "fever measurement" I saw an interesting Youtube video from FLIR:
https://youtu.be/uvkh6K_dZqQ?t=1878Interesting the statement that even standard thermal cameras (accuracy +-2°/2%) can sometimes be accurate in the range of 0.3 to 0.5°C if you use them accordingly. Or was that just an attempt to increase general sales?
But there is a whole lot about the device (HIKMICRO 20) that bothers me personally which I had already thought about when I was researching thermal cameras in general:
- low resolution of 256x192
- fixed focus (min. distance 0.15m), could be better
- "Fusion" looks very bad. There is a firmware update, but I haven't installed it yet, which should improve it
- no removable battery. If I keep the device longer, it could lose battery performance quite quickly
- the display quality seems very low: It looks like only 256 colors are displayed while the thermal image on the PC has a higher color bandwidth. You can see real "gradient areas" on the display
- Photos are only saved as JPG and not as PNG. The export function in the "HIKMICRO Analyzer" software produces an even worse picture
By the way I bought a
ZnSe lens FL 50mm from eBay because I read about macro measurements here on the forum. It arrives tomorrow so I'm excited to see what new things I can learn about thermography. Maybe this will also help me to gather some insights into leaf temperatures. So far I had the impression that the B20 didn't get close enough to the leaves.
There are also two things that surprised me:
- I underestimated the high sensitivity of the device
- the connection of the device to the smartphone and the use of the Android app (HIKMICRO Viewer) ran absolutely smoothly!
As I have seen there seems to be very slow development in the thermal camera sector. In contrast to the outdoor area where the manufacturers outdo each other at short intervals. The handheld thermal cameras are also more intended for the industry, they are more solvent and less development was needed, higher prices and fewer developments. I'd rather have a 640x480 and possibly interchangeable lenses as well. But all this moves in price regions that will remain closed to me forever. And even if I did: I would never spend that much money on it, somehow the cost-benefit factor is missing. I just hope that there will be some movement here due to the growing outdoor area. There are 640x480 devices running at 50Hz and <25mk NETD for 3.4k. That would still be affordable, but the temperature measurements are missing.
Personally I can't do much with smartphone thermal cameras because I want to use my own device and don't want to be dependent on the smartphone. Also the quality seems not to be very decent. I think I will return my device and later choose a HIKMICRO M30 as it has a few advantages:
- higher resolution 384x288
- manual focus up to 0.7m
- replaceable batteries
- maybe a better display quality?
There is also the FLIR E4 (
liberation update
) with a higher resolution. But after testing the B20 I know I wouldn't be happy with only 9 Hz and it also has only a fixed focus with a wide angle lens.
Luckily I found this forum full of thermal camera nerds.
Apparently there are many more cameras in the world than I found at first glance. What I learned from the forum so far is that the lens and the focal length play a very important role in the quality of the photos and that the resolution is just another factor.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
