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

[Ben321]

I already have a Seek Compact Pro fast frame that is 320x240 at approximately 15fps. 15fps is definitely better than the 9Hz of the FLIR One, and 320x240 is an absolutely huge improvement. So I'm now looking for my next thermal cam, at 640x480 resolution, but not from FLIR. Their absolute dirt cheapest 640x480 class of thermal cam is about $3000, way above what I'm going to pay. For that I've turned to try to find some 640x480 thermal cams from Chinese companies. But there's 2 problems. First problem is, most of these Chinese companies who's websites I can find do not show prices, nor even name distributors. So to find prices I find myself Googling the exact make and model of camera, along with the word "price" in the search string, for each model of camera from that manufacturer. Eventually I get to some online stores on websites who's names I've never heard of, selling the cameras, and show the price of the devices. Unfortunately though, this is the second problem. The price for 640x480 thermal cams, even from Chinese companies, are bottoming out at just under $3000.

What makes these 640x480 thermal cams so expensive, regardless of what company is making them?
Is it lack of competition? Do they just not feel the need to make the price any less than slightly below the next cheapest competitor?
Is it the price of manufacture? Like to pay the electric bills for running the factories due to the special equipment used to make these cameras (as well as employees who operate the factories), do the factories cost more to run than the typical visible light camera factory?
Is it the price of the raw materials? Are the special materials used in thermal imaging cameras like vanadium oxide and germanium, simply that much more expensive for the manufacturers to acquire, than it would be for them to acquire the raw materials needed to make a visible light camera?

So are they making actually a very narrow profit margin as it is already, and $3000 per camera is simply the actual monetary worth/value of each camera? Or are they making obscenely huge profit margins, and due to lack of competition they simply see no reason to lower the price more, so they keep it right where it is (and thus continue to make obscenely huge profit margins)?

[Ben321]

You're probably right with respect to the factors.

* Limited competition for market share

* Limited competition based on price

* Limited market demand; currently sales are probably 99% to business / government relatively few to consumer uses.  Generally they're used in industry for some test / analysis / diagnostic etc. purpose and if a solution is needed to solve that problem, it doesn't really matter so much if the price was $100 or $100,000; either way if there's a business need to do it it'll make its way into some annual budget and get amortized / whatever over N years if it costs more than a few thousand.  So even if it was only $500 most of the time they'd still have to get purchase approvals and go through the same process to justify / finance it, so $5000 not much difference.
Also most business / industrial applications will probably buy / lease something and expect to keep it in service
at least 5-10 years so there's steady demand but not a huge growth in demand of volume for upgrades.

* Limited technology overlap -- the sensors are custom made down to the process technology, packaging, testing, etc. as far as I know.  It isn't just like some CMOS image sensor with the RGB microfilters replaced by an LWIR transparent layer, it's a totally different sensor technology.  Basically some "fab" factory that makes this kind of stuff and not general purpose ICs so limited "free" Moore's law scaling and ability to share large high volume wafer fabs and such.  Now if someone DID come up with a way to make these work on a high volume commodity CMOS process you'd see them in $10 webcam toys in walmart in a year, but for maybe hundreds to thousands of dollars or more in sensor / packaging / testing cost for the imager core alone there's not a lot of volume demand to make more than thousands per year of high end ones and maybe 10x-100x of that for mid-range & low end.

* Look at CCDs vs. CMOS image sensors -- back in the 1980-2000 time frame most digital video cameras or still cameras well industrial or commercial, usually several hundreds of dollars for even low mid-end VGA/SVGA/PAL/NTSC kinds of units, and several thousand dollar units most common for any moderately serious industrial / videography / scientific sort of camera.  Only a hand full of companies making decent CCD sensors themselves and the sensors and chipset alone often cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.  Most consumer market stuff was using film or vidicon or low end CCD.   Then they started to come out with tolerably good VGA / 2MP / 4MP etc. CMOS image sensors good enough for cheap consumer / small business CCTV cameras, toys, entertainment cameras, and over a few years the CCD market for anything much lower than the higher end industrial sensors vanished and now there are sub $1 VGA CMOS image sensors from the likes of OmniVision, usually two 2MP or more sensors in every one of the several millions of mobile phones / tablets / laptops made every year, and even $5-$10 webcam toys from Walmart etc.   And still today if you want a half decent CCD you'll probably still spend thousands of dollars for your industrial / scientific imager.

* Look at the market share / use of cell phone cameras for mass consumer use vs. people that own and regularly use a semi decent consumer level dedicated video camera or DSLR with proper lenses, much better / larger sensors, etc.  A $50 disposable cell phone gets you a camera good enough for a well lit selfie, and a halfway decent consumer mid-entry level SLR is still more like $1000, more like $2000-$3000 for a much better prosumer or low end commercial camera.  Very different costs of sensors & peripherals (lenses,...)  Very different quality level.  Very different market e.g. 1 billion units / year made vs 100k units / year made or something like that. $10 sensor on commodity wafer process vs. $400-$1000 sensor made on with a custom / niche production design but STILL using (mostly) the commodity CMOS manufacturing fabs / technologies.  Give up using the commodity production lines and the prices go up way more still.

As an amateur astronomer, photographer, scientist, engineer, etc. I'd love to see a THz to UV/X-ray sensitive multi-spectral imager array technology family that could be obtained inexpensively and used for commodity sensing / imaging just like CMOS image sensors have done for RGB / near IR.  Maybe with more novel sensor / fabrication technologies we could be on the cusp of seeing imager arrays with novel spectral capabilities, HDR, TOF, whatever and maybe we'll have $10 toy LWIR webcams in Walmart in 10 years.  But that'll probably be incidental to the technology getting so cheap that even people / applications that don't "need" it gets the capability for so close to free that it is just integrated into lots of things as a matter of course if the sensors are $10 or whatever then most every $50 surveillance camera gets one etc.

People using thermal cams for mission critical applications aren't going to buy a celphone USB dongle for it. Those cellphone thermal cams aren't for industrial/commercial/military type stuff. Those are for hobbyists. There's an extensive hobby market for these, but for some reason, the makers of these (even the Chinese companies) don't seem to realize that 160x120 or even 320x240 resolution is NOT what hobbyists want in their cellphone thermal cams. What we hobbyists WANT is 640x480 or better. There is actually a sizeable hobbyist market for these, but all the thermal cam companies don't seem to have realized it yet. They are still selling these low-res (320x240 or less) cellphone thermal cams for HUNDREDS of dollars each, when my 1080p FULL HD webcam costs less than $100.

The people running these companies are putting high prices on their cellphone thermal cams, that leads me to believe that they are under the mistaken impression that these cellphone thermal cams are mostly being used by professionals. But they aren't. They are mostly used by hobbyists. And the manufacturers seem to really not be properly trying to capture this hobbyist market, by lowering the prices to under $100 like they should be . This leaves me wondering if the manufacturers themselves are hitting a price barrier. Are the companies themselves maybe actually barely making a profit on these cellphone dongles? Does it actually cost the companies more than I'm thinking to make them? Like for a $500 thermal camera for my cellphone, does it actually cost the company almost $500 per unit to make them?

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?

[james_s]

People using thermal cams for mission critical applications aren't going to buy a celphone USB dongle for it. Those cellphone thermal cams aren't for industrial/commercial/military type stuff. Those are for hobbyists. There's an extensive hobby market for these, but for some reason, the makers of these (even the Chinese companies) don't seem to realize that 160x120 or even 320x240 resolution is NOT what hobbyists want in their cellphone thermal cams. What we hobbyists WANT is 640x480 or better. There is actually a sizeable hobbyist market for these, but all the thermal cam companies don't seem to have realized it yet. They are still selling these low-res (320x240 or less) cellphone thermal cams for HUNDREDS of dollars each, when my 1080p FULL HD webcam costs less than $100.

I think you're confusing what hobbyists want with what *you* want. Higher resolution is always better, but I'd be pretty happy with 320x240, I can't really think of an application I have that really needs more than that. I suspect the vast majority of hobbyists would be happy with a modest resolution, price is by far the most important aspect to hobbyists. You can't compare a mobile phone camera to a thermal camera. A microbolometer is a completely different tech than a CMOS image sensor.

[bap2703]

The real question is: why reverse cost analysis of microbolometers are so expensive ?! Hobbyist want it for free ! 

[Microdoser]

Aside from the drastic difference in economics of scale between a billion people buying a visible light sensor and the number of people wanting an IR sensor, one reason might be the sheer size of the sensor needed to get a high resolution image at IR wavelengths.

I am unsure of the relationship between wavelength and minimum pixel sensor size, but the wavelength at -20c is 0.0014cm so you are looking at a 640 pixel sensor that has an absolute minimum size of ~1cm before photons become smeared over multiple pixels.

Adding in the other required tech needed to focus IR light onto a sensor of that size, and the theoretical minimum size for any device of that resolution is much larger than would easily just plug into a phone. Far larger than a standard camera. Development costs become exponentially greater as you approach theoretical limits...

Modern phones get around this size limit with expensively developed software and other tricks. With the vastly lower number of customers for an IR device, these costs have to be spread around far fewer people, so the cost to the individual user will be proportionately greater.

Just because you are China does not mean you can ignore physics or basic economics.

[Bill W]

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.

[Ben321]

Aside from the drastic difference in economics of scale between a billion people buying a visible light sensor and the number of people wanting an IR sensor, one reason might be the sheer size of the sensor needed to get a high resolution image at IR wavelengths.

I am unsure of the relationship between wavelength and minimum pixel sensor size, but the wavelength at -20c is 0.0014cm so you are looking at a 640 pixel sensor that has an absolute minimum size of ~1cm before photons become smeared over multiple pixels.

Adding in the other required tech needed to focus IR light onto a sensor of that size, and the theoretical minimum size for any device of that resolution is much larger than would easily just plug into a phone. Far larger than a standard camera. Development costs become exponentially greater as you approach theoretical limits...

Modern phones get around this size limit with expensively developed software and other tricks. With the vastly lower number of customers for an IR device, these costs have to be spread around far fewer people, so the cost to the individual user will be proportionately greater.

Just because you are China does not mean you can ignore physics or basic economics.

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). Yes there are already dongles that are 640x480, but they cost about $3000 (just as if they were a standalone thermal cam), which as far as I can tell is not really what it costs to make. I'm guessing they are just making obscene profits from selling these dongles.

[Ben321]

Aside from the drastic difference in economics of scale between a billion people buying a visible light sensor and the number of people wanting an IR sensor, one reason might be the sheer size of the sensor needed to get a high resolution image at IR wavelengths.

I am unsure of the relationship between wavelength and minimum pixel sensor size, but the wavelength at -20c is 0.0014cm so you are looking at a 640 pixel sensor that has an absolute minimum size of ~1cm before photons become smeared over multiple pixels.

Adding in the other required tech needed to focus IR light onto a sensor of that size, and the theoretical minimum size for any device of that resolution is much larger than would easily just plug into a phone. Far larger than a standard camera. Development costs become exponentially greater as you approach theoretical limits...

Modern phones get around this size limit with expensively developed software and other tricks. With the vastly lower number of customers for an IR device, these costs have to be spread around far fewer people, so the cost to the individual user will be proportionately greater.

Just because you are China does not mean you can ignore physics or basic economics.

Also I think this is a matter of marketing. If they really wanted to sell these to hobbyists. They could advertise on TV ads. You say not as many people want these. I think many people would want them, but just they don't know they exist. I bet people who saw the TV ads could be convinced to want it if the ad showed them what it's capable of. Maybe billions buy cellphones or webcams, but still at least tens of millions will want thermal cam attachments for their phones, if they knew they existed. I have not seen even one ad on national TV during a commercial break, for things like the FLIR One and the Seek Compoct Pro. I wouldn't expect the Chinese companies to advertise directly on US TV, but if they have US distributors I would expect those distributors to advertise on US TV. But they never do. It's like they WANT almost nobody to know about these, so they can remain forever exotic (and thus very expensive) pieces of equipment.

[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.

The design costs are eventually paid off, but companies almost NEVER lower their prices. The Chinese company has managed to make LWIR microbolometer arrays at much smaller sizes than 12um. They have gotten them down to 8um, according to this big splash screen on their website (which also says that they are the first company in the world to accomplish this).
https://www.infiray.com/products/
I've linked to this screenshot in case they change this banner at some point.

Hopefully shrinking pixel physical size will shrink the price by the same amount. And yes they claim this new sensor using this new technology also has the massive (for thermal cams at least) resolution of 1920x1080 (which unfortunately raises the cost again).

[Vipitis]

yet there is no product using the 8μm pixel pitch sensor. Or even sample pictures.


You still overestimate how the market is distributed. I linked a report a while ago that answers all your questions and has numbers go back it up. It's not free to read tho, but consumer market for uncooled microbolometers is just a tiny fraction. Hunting and UAV outsells DIY markets already, and they do have a lot of VGA sized products.

The 1920x1200 sensor doesn't exist because hobbyists want larger sensors (which I got told isn't meant for hobbyists), but the British military got an upgrade for their tanks - which is why that product even exists in the first place.

[james_s]

Also I think this is a matter of marketing. If they really wanted to sell these to hobbyists. They could advertise on TV ads. You say not as many people want these. I think many people would want them, but just they don't know they exist. I bet people who saw the TV ads could be convinced to want it if the ad showed them what it's capable of. Maybe billions buy cellphones or webcams, but still at least tens of millions will want thermal cam attachments for their phones, if they knew they existed. I have not seen even one ad on national TV during a commercial break, for things like the FLIR One and the Seek Compoct Pro. I wouldn't expect the Chinese companies to advertise directly on US TV, but if they have US distributors I would expect those distributors to advertise on US TV. But they never do. It's like they WANT almost nobody to know about these, so they can remain forever exotic (and thus very expensive) pieces of equipment.

I think you are borderline obsessed with thermal cameras and *vastly* overestimate the interest to hobbyists. I only know one hobbyist that owns a thermal camera, the other people I know that have them are in the home inspection and energy auditing businesses. I briefly considered buying one but then realized I can just borrow the Flir camera my friend has when/if I have a need for one. It's a very specialized tool that most people simply do not need, even more technical people. They're neat, yes, but for most people the novelty wears off rather quickly.

[Bill W]

The design costs are eventually paid off, but companies almost NEVER lower their prices. T

Only when the production run is beyond the initial estimate and has paid back the costs.

Typical corporate politics usually results in over enthusiastic sales forecasts (as you are indeed making) so the amortisation number is rarely met.  Sales also take the lowest price the accountants will allow to make it easier to sell.

If the amortisation is ever met, either the product is obsolete so you make the next one with more development costs, or prices do indeed drop to increase market share.

FLIR internal economics are somewhat weird though.  As we know E4-E8 for example have the same part cost, but E8 will be making a far greater share of the R&D payback and marketing.

[svgurus]

In my experience, there were 0 photographers or hobbyists who were ready to buy thermal)) I'm making photos with thermal camera almost 2 years already, folks that i shoot ask what camera do i use regularly and i thought to see some Russian copycats or at least someone who would dig for deeper technical details or share something interesting with me, for now i was wrong) one funny case was at studio visit party, i talked with girl artist about my camera and she told her father had similar model and used it for hunting. She is working with tech installations rather than pure visuals but still i was amazed to know that she saw some cool imaging device but didn't research its capabilities.
About phone dongles - this segment of market is really declining, rumors about iray t6s turned out to lead nowhere, opgal stopped manufacturing any therm-apps, thermal expert didn't upgrade their V1 model. some hopes for flir, they recently upgraded tau2 and boson, maybe they will roll out some decent 320 dongle but most likely no 640 ones
What really amuses(sometimes scares/disgusts) me are 80-160pix sensors in some "serious usage" devices, including not only tech inspection toys made by flir/fluke/testo/chinese (wow! this c3 lepton based camera has so robust and ergonomic case and such great reporting capabilities! ) but even hunting gun sights by AGM or some chinese.  but then again, i see some reviews of 384-640 thermals where hunters compare different models by setting some strange digital zoom multiplier(1,3x, 2,4x ) so, either people are dumb en masse or we shouldn't judge them by our standards and experiences
and yeah, to put all woes in 1 post, my favorite notebook review website STILL uses some flir one plus msx to show heating map of notebooks, its 2022 omg these photos looked high-tech in 2014, they have rigorous yet aesthetic approach to making reviews, but this tiny detail freaks me out when i scroll to this part))

[cdev]

Its entirely possible there is a cartel style agreement when one observes what appears to be price fixing. Reading up on the issue, it appears these cartels are very common in various industries and indeed, are fairly normal when big businesses get together. The classic example is the cartel that was formed to fix the prices and lifetimes of tungsten filament light bulbs in the past. When they are set up, generally, they always do the same few things.

In the case of the light bulbs they optimiized the setup for more frequent bulb sales by requiring they burned out in a short period of time. Bulbs lasting years, as one particular bulb has, was internally forbidden. Manufacturers put their heads together and figured out how to do this. And how to keep the existence of this cartel quiet, too.

In the Silicon Valley case, the big firms agreed to forbid their "poaching" one another's workers.  In part to keep wages low. When they got caught they switched strategies to the international staffing market. In essence they moved their activities above the jurisdiction of countries to stop them. By using international staffing deals.

Now we cant stop them.

Years ago when I was involved with consumer electronics, a certain manufacturer was obsessed by keeping their prices high. They did this by only selling to vendors who agreed to do that.

Who knows!? I know that I would buy one of those thermal imagers, if they were cheaper. I could definitely use it for a lot of things. Like improving my energy efficiency!

Peace!

[janoc]

Don't forget that thermal imaging is a dual use technology and tightly regulated. Those imagers are used for everything from night vision devices, targeting pods to missile seekers.

So the better stuff isn't going to get on the mass market where e.g. Russians or Iran could buy it and use it (e.g. the Russian problems with obtaining thermal sights for their military are well known). This applies to the Chinese manufacturers too - they will keep the better sensors for themselves.

[cdev]

My requirements are extremely modest and totally peaceful. I am just looking for air leaks in my house, before the weather gets too warm to see them. Frame rate is utterly unimportant. It could be "one every minute" for all that I care, for example.

[james_s]

My requirements are extremely modest and totally peaceful. I am just looking for air leaks in my house, before the weather gets too warm to see them. Frame rate is utterly unimportant. It could be "one every minute" for all that I care, for example.

Call a home inspector or energy auditor, they'll come and do exactly that for you. Or just buy one of the less expensive cameras and sell it once you've finished checking your house.

[cdev]

That would cost more than a camera would. And be a one time only event.

[Ben321]

In my experience, there were 0 photographers or hobbyists who were ready to buy thermal))

That's because of their price. If the companies wanted to expand their business, they would lower prices, and advertise on national TV, and I'm sure millions of people would want to buy.

About phone dongles - this segment of market is really declining

Again, that's because they didn't MASSIVELY drop the prices for the dongles to help them be affordable to the average person, nor did they advertise them properly so the average person would know they existed.

The failure of consumer level thermal imagers is due to botched business practices of the manufacturers of those devices. The companies in question aren't familliar with how to properly target their products to average people, because average people aren't the people who buy the majority of their products. They usually sell to other companies and the military who use the equipment for mission critical applications. They forget that average person doesn't want to spend $500 on a 160x120 camera at 9fps. They forget that unlike entities buying stuff for mission critical applications, the average person doesn't have unlimited money to spend. So then when they DO make a products for the average person, they still charge WAY TOO MUCH, because they forget that the average person isn't about to spend that much on a camera with a tiny resolution. So they basically have TORPEDOED their own consumer level equipment, with bad business practices, because they don't know how to handle selling it to the average consumer.

[Ben321]

I think you are borderline obsessed with thermal cameras

I just want a thermal cam with DECENT resolution. 320x240 isn't decent. It's basically a joke for any modern camera. Around the year 2000, I got a Logitech webcam for $50, and its resolution was 320x240. Now a webcam with the same resolution wouldn't even bother to be manufactured by any company, due to it being TOO LOW of a resolution. And if it was manufactured now it would cost about $5 to buy one. 640x480 is what I would consider to be decent resolution.

[Ben321]

Its entirely possible there is a cartel style agreement when one observes what appears to be price fixing.

Bingo. We have a winner. Yes, you can't even get a much better deal from Chinese companies. It seems there's an INTERNATIONAL cartel here. Chinese and American companies have colluded to fix the minimum allowed price for a 640x480 thermal imager, to be about $3000. If there was no cartel, while FLIR might sell such cams at a minimum of $3000, the Chinese companies would do as they always do in other industries, and MASSIVELY undersell their American competitors. I would expect a Chinese 640x480 thermal imager to be about $750 to $1500, but instead it was only a couple hundred dollars below $3000. This right here is like absolute smoking gun proof of price fixing.

[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.

[Bill W]

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)

[Vipitis]

OP acts increasingly irrational

Yes, these cameras are expensive. Take a course on economy or read up on some ideas. imaging sensors are everywhere, that's why they are so cheaply available. The market is larger and two orders of magnitude is easily explained if you look at product volume. Don't act like you know better than the industry veterans that have decades of experience. It's simply disrespectful.
Your viewpoint is strongly biased by the only data point you have, your own opinion. Which is a bad idea for any kind of venture that relies on other people.

See some current overviews listed here http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/2022/03/state-of-image-sensor-market.html?m=1
And then look up the latest Yole report on uncooled microbolometers to get an idea of what the market actually looks like and where it's heading. Perhaps that will even show you when 640x512 sensors will be available in consumer products and for prices you can afford.


If you really want to have a high resolution thermal imager, you would manage to do so - by either securing the funding or finding an ebay bargain. I know of several people on this forum that managed to get their hands on VGA sized sensors for well below the 3000$ price tag you experience. Myself included.

[james_s]

I just want a thermal cam with DECENT resolution. 320x240 isn't decent. It's basically a joke for any modern camera. Around the year 2000, I got a Logitech webcam for $50, and its resolution was 320x240. Now a webcam with the same resolution wouldn't even bother to be manufactured by any company, due to it being TOO LOW of a resolution. And if it was manufactured now it would cost about $5 to buy one. 640x480 is what I would consider to be decent resolution.

Many would disagree with you, including me. 320x240 is quite good resolution for a *thermal* camera. You are comparing apples to horses, could that 640x480 webcam see heat? No it cannot, entirely different device with an entirely different purpose. 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.