220 x 160 IR Resolution HTI Thermal Imager, Handheld 35200 Pixels Thermal Imaging Camera with 3.2" Color Display Screen(Battery Included)

The comparison and tests were made between Flir TG165 and this HT-18Pros:- sensor quality, way more details than TG165. As you can see in the picture, more areas are marked in red for HT-18 instead just the facial area for TG165. The automatic high/low temperature point tracking is very useful and reliable feature- $409 retail price is another big advantage at these specs.Cons(not really Cons, more like something can be improved:- Too bulky. According to the tear down from the fellow from EEVBlog, an A33 modular logic/CPU board is used on the top of the customized PCB, which make the overall dimension larger, since good amount of body volume was used for enhance the rigidity. I understand this is the trade off your engineers made to expedite the developing process and reduce the risk. I hope you guys will get better understanding of the Chipset and have them fully integrated to your own PCB.- clicking sound(perhaps from the lens shutter?) is kinda annoying. It is claimed to working at 8Hz display rate but it is clearly not as smooth as what behaved on TG165 although it displays at 9Hz rate.- booting time is significantly slower than TG165- battery isn't that long consider its size. It lasted less longer than TG165, I understand there are more information to process. Please consider to use 3000 mah 18650 battery instead of 2000mah.- firmware needs to be polished.- another big disadvantage is the viewing angle, which is kinda narrow for me, compare the 50 degree for TG165 and 45 degree for flir E4. I have to keep the camera slightly further away from my PCB in order to have a good coverage.- Since the camera has both IR camera and regular camera, 2 image will only align well when the object is far enough. Compare to Flir E4-E8, who had their 2 cameras really close to each other, the HT-18 has its regular camera placed on top of the IR camera with farther distance. If HTI is willing to make some upgrade its lens module to reduce the distance in between 2 cameras while providing viewing angle to 40-45 degrees, it can be the Flir E4 upgrade option killer market killer :DOverall, I am happy with this product, and can’t go back to TG165 anymore.

Take a look at the pictures. Flir does connect real image to thermal image and it does if fact seem to produce nice images… until both images don’t align properly. I used the calibration option, but if I changed angle, image was not aligned again. Flir Pro has two temperature range settings, higher range was used only for the fireplace.In terms of image quality – HT-18 has highest thermal resolution sensor (220x160), then Flir Pro (160x120), and lastly Flir One (80x60). The way Flir fools you is that it takes photo in 1440x1080 resolution and then overlays the thermal image over it. HT-18 saves 240x320 pixel images so I needed to enlarge them for the comparison. I really like extra “heat” details that HT captures, as Flir seems to blur images too much (due to lower resolution thermal sensors), but HT-18 has smaller field of vision.In terms of accuracy – it’s hard to tell since I have those three devices and IR thermometer. For the comparison of 3d printer bed – printer was set up to heat to 80C. Seems like HT aligns with whatever IR thermometer is telling better than Flirs.Couple points:Flir – little space, photos directly on the phone so easy to share, need to be charged separately from the phone, One is software limited to one measurement spot, Flir watermark on all photos.HT-18 – higher refresh rate and less “calibrating” pauses, feels more secure in hand and less like a toy, 18650 battery meaning it can be more or less easy replaced, my PC refuses to connect to HT-18 if connected to USB 3 ports, USB 2 works fine, my laptop doesn’t care, my phone with usb-c to USB 3 adapter works fine.If your budget is <$200 you can’t go wrong with Flir One, but if it’s <$500 then HT-18 seems to win. Overall, I will keep HT-18 and hopefully it will last me a long time.

This is a solid tool, well built and seems to live up to its specifications. Quite a cool piece of tech!The on screen menus and controls take some getting used to but work fine for "live viewing" stuff like when you're in person looking around a wall or a circuit board at that moment.Where it falls short is as a logger or data capture device. There's not really any significant options for the files it captures. You always get a compressed JPEG with all the on-screen-display stuff also baked in, and the color range is randomly scaled to whatever it felt like at the moment you took the picture. Add the fact that the visible webcam is inevitably skewed from the thermal view no matter how much you mess with the alignment and the files are basically garbage for later analysis.It'd be really nice if it had an option to capture a raw TIFF of just the exact thermal pixels and store it separate from the visible webcam and onscreen metadata. As it is it's a great tool "in the field" but a total toy using the captured snapshots "back at the office".

The HT -18 is a great value for a thermal camera with decent resolution. I use it for home inspection and electronics testing. The design is much more robust than the add-on to your phone type and easier to handle as well. The User interface is well designed however could use a a few tweaks regarding how the image hold function button works. Overall I find the camera very useful and affordable. The case is very well made and fits perfectly. Highly recommended product as nothing out there in this price segment that comes close.Will try again to add photos when Amazon fixes their bug (images never load, app just hangs).