I'm seeing mixed/negative opinions in customer comments, but who knows where they're coming from.
Seems to be a gap in the YouTube-market for a detailed review/test of this device, if anyone here is interested.
I ordered one from Aliexpress before Christmas. When it arrived, the neutral field calibration shutter appeared to be stuck, so it kept trying to calibrate with it open which made the image unusable. I had no issue returning it - they gave me a UK address to send it to and the refund was done fairly quickly after they got it back.
It definitely did have a 256 x 192 resolution however.
I have since ordered a Tooltop T256, since that was by then at a lower price. That also has the same resolution and that is working fine - it has the Tiny1-C core and also works with the Infiray P2 Pro app as well as the Topdon TC001 app.
They are both manufactured by Shenzhen Dianyang Technology Co, who make a variety of thermal imaging products. The Tooltop T7 is on their website listed as the model H2FB:
https://www.dyt-ir.com/h2fb-mobile-thermal-camera-product/ The T256 I have is called H2F. They also make a lower resolution variant of both.
@tankslapper
Thanks for all that.
Could you name some other 256x192 cameras that you've used and can say are comparable in terms of image quality?
Personally, I own a Guide PC210.
I haven't directly used any others with the same resolution. I have used a Flir One however (not sure if it was first or second generation) and this one produces far superior thermal images. That is slightly offset by the Flir edge overlay feature, but I don't find that to be necessary with the better resolution. Having 25Hz refresh is also quite nice.
From what I've seen people post, I think these cameras which use the same sensor are all pretty much the same in hardware, but the software does differ between them. They all do things slightly differently, but none of them do everything I want. The one supplied with the Tooltop one is I think the same as with the Victor VC328B and the Mileseey TR256i. It is functional but a bit quirky. The image is a bit more raw and has less processing than the P2 Pro or Topdon app so images with narrower temperature spans look more noisy, whereas the others produce a more smooth image.
The P2 Pro app is the one I use most often because it saves images which include the raw thermal data as well, and that allows you to post process them with software.
There is an opening for someone to make an an app for these cameras which does all the basics properly - things like setting a fixed span for the scale easily, and saving images oriented properly according to how you hold the phone. All of these current apps are somewhat buggy and have flaws in how they go about doing things, which could be corrected quite easily with a bit of thought. They all seem to have been written to provide something that 'works' rather than a polished product.
That said, for the price I'm quite happy with the capabilities of it, and it's perfectly OK for doing things like spotting missing insulation and damp patches and general geekery etc. If you want something more repeatable and customisable then that's where using external PC software or a more polished product like Flir would probably be better.
Does the Tooltop T256 allow manual setting of the span?
The Uni-T UTi260B/690B cameras are 256x192, and are quite popular. At least when they came out, they were the best camera on the market for the price. Lots of competition since then so not sure if that still holds true, but one YouTuber said it was practically as good as his $3K Flir camera and he wished it had been available when he bought his Flir.
I've had the UTi690B for awhile now and it works well for me. If I had a complaint it would be the vertical/portrait display orientation. I'd prefer a landscape orientation.
And FWIW, you can open it up, solder in a pin header, and use a TTL to USB serial adapter to get a console to manipulate and unbrick it should a firmware update go bad. There's a thread or two here on that. I rescued mine that way. Banggood is the exclusive distributor of the 690B model (it's just a whitelabeled 260B) and they provide support directly, rather than Uni-T. Banggood support sent me a v2 firmware upgrade that bricked my v1 hardware model. I was able to recover it from the guidance in those threads.
Does the Tooltop T256 allow manual setting of the span?
Yes, kind of. The native app lets you adjust the span with sliders which is kind of like adjusting the black and white points on a digital camera. You can't directly set a fixed span though, eg by setting an exact maximum and minimum temperature. Here's an example:
The limitation with it is that the adjustment is not setting the actual temperature span, but is limiting the spectrum to a percentage of the minimum and maximum temperatures in the image. This works OK if the image is static, but if something moves into or out of the frame that changes the overall temperature range, then you end up with a span covering a different range.
The P2 pro app doesn't allow you to do that at all though. If you modify the span in that, then instead of adjusting the span so the whole spectrum is used between the temperatures you set, it instead clips the values above and below, which is not very useful:
Sorry for the rotated images, but you should get the point. The attachment handling in this forum software is annoying.
Thank you
Although the manual setting initially looks useful, your description says it's not really (for my application).
One of the things I found a fixed span good for is detecting damp in my office roof. I set the minimum span (can't remember the rangs offhand, but it's a couple or few degrees) and the major part of the roof is orange. Pan the camera and the damp bits jump out as purple. But with auto-range, as you pan the colours change according to the average in view, and the damp just doesn't stand out any more.
So I don't mind the cut-off type (in fact, that might even help), but once the colours are set for a range of temperatures they have to stay that way regardless.
Yes all the apps I have tried with it have limitations of one sort of another. It needs someone to make an open source android app which addresses basic functionality like that. Unfortunately that's not within my skillset or I'd give it a go.
It's like the devs for the existing ones wrote what they thought would be useful without actually trying to use it in practice.
Old thread but I ended up buying the Tooltop T7 and use it with the P2 Pro app. It's a really nice thermal camera for ~100USD. The pixels appear to be very closely matched. Previously I was using a Seek micro USB thermal camera and the pixels were really NOT matched, so the temperature differences between pixels was very noticeable. This has been a great upgrade for me personally.
The camera supposedly has Tiny1-c core? how can it be, wherever I look, the core retails at 300+ buckaroos, while this camera retails as low as 180 dollhairs?
Is this one of those "economy of scale" things, where we lesser beings must pay premium for daring so much as bother the noble manufacturers and must go trough retailer as a good liter consumer we are... or am I looking at wrong places.