Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is worth the buy if you can find practical uses for it. For example, finding studs, checking the relative effectiveness of air barriers and seals throughout the house, water leaks, electrical wire heat, appliance heat. Background and Perspective: This device brings a very unique and useful tool into the hands of those who couldn’t normally afford the higher end version. The more expensive version of this tool for the public is about $25,000 dollars. Therefore it’s limited to those who use it for professional use. Yet this version can be used for the home or low quality commercial diagnoses. This version cannot compare fairly to the more expensive version so to criticize it doesn’t allow fairness to the fact that it still provides very useful and helpful information to those who can make use of the information you can gain from it. The ‘SEEK’ Ability: There are important aspects of this device that you must understand before you buy so you know what to expect in terms of range and visibility. This device will not be a disappointment as long as you know what to expect. The device doesn’t have the outline overlay feature of it’s only competitor but that’s not as important since most of the time you will be looking for significant temperature variations that when captured in the view, will automatically allow you to distinguish what is hot/cold because it will stick out from other objects in the view. If the view on the camera is not easy to understand, just look past the phone and get oriented. It’s not a big deal, use your other eye I measured the amount of area I could view with the camera and the length at which I had to stand in order to capture an object. (see pictures) These are the distances from the objects in my pictures to the lense of the camera. See pictures for quality. 1) You can see my finger when it is 4-inches from the lense 2) The center of my watch is 10.25-inches from the lense 3) The 3’ x 5.5’ window is 12.85’ from the lense 4) The Printer and 2 Power Adaptors are 5’ from lense (there are two adaptors in the picture and they are not distinguishable from each other) Description of other pictures: 5) There was a hot water leak as you can see from the hotter area in the waste pipe in the ceiling – I was able to see it unexpectedly and found the upstairs faucet to be left open. 6) I was able to see the area of hot air normally invisible, from a low flame on the stove 7) I was able to see a difference in temperatures from two windows where apartments where renovated and that of two windows where apartments where not renovated. 8) I can see the heat from my computer and hard-drive 9) I could see the cold water and hot water pipe in blue and yellow respectively 10) I could see the temperature of the boiler gas fan Toilet-Paper Roll as the Frame of View: In order to imagine the field of view you should expect; a good perspective for you to understand what scanning your environment would look like is to take a used toilet-paper roll and raise it to one eye. The area you can view through the toilet roll is pretty much the same area you catch from the lense of the camera while holding the camera at 9-12 inches from your nose. The default magnification of the SEEK is large. If you slightly squeeze the toilet roll, forming a vertical elliptical, it would mimic the field of view you would get from holding the phone in portrait view; and the same if you did the same horizontally for a landscape view. Lag: There is a lag of 1-second when the ‘image soothing’ feature is off and a 2-second lag with the feature ‘on’. I don’t yet see any use for the smoothing feature. I don’t think it makes a difference. When scanning across the screen of the Plasma TV, the image is best when scanning at about two seconds per foot across the screen when 8 feet away from the screen. Battery: Since the SEEK uses your phone battery it can last a fair amount of time. I happen to have en extended battery on my phone which is slightly old and I also use the SEEK periodically and randomly throughout the day as I am still playing around with what I can find with it. I don’t find the need to look after my battery level at all. I do not feel the seek is a battery drain. Compatibility: I have a Samsung S4 with Android 5.0.1 and the camera and features listed work fine. There is one feature I didn’t find talked about much and that is the ‘Image Smoothing’ feature, which works fine. The volume buttons also function as camera shutter buttons. Since the port is on the bottom I activate rotation on the phone and turn it upside down. This is useful except when you want to use dual image mode whereby your hand ends up blocking the phone camera as you hold the phone normally. I find it useful to use dual camera mode when turning the camera in landscape view while taking pictures Color Palette: The colors are varied. There are 9 color palette options. The color adjusts to what the hottest and coldest temperatures in the view are. If you have a face in the view and then light a match next to the person while in the view the color gradient will adjust to highlight the NEW hottest points to the coolest points. Menu Options: Help ----Tutorials ----Reset Help Overlays ----Report and Issue ----Visit Support Center Temperature Units (select) ----Fahrenheit ----Celsius ----Kelvin Image preferences ----Aspect Ratio (select) --------16:9 --------4:3 ----Watermarks --------Date and Time (on/off) --------Location (on/off) --------Seek Logo (on/off) ----Metadata --------Disable Geo-tagging (on/off) Image Smoothing (on/off) Terms and policies ----Privacy Policy ----Terms and Conditions Help Us Improve ----Send Usage Data (on/off) About ----Application Software Version ----Image Processing Software Version Phone Camera Dual Image: I find this feature not useful except for times when I want to take a picture to log the environment I was in at the time as I can imagine forgetting the context of a thermal picture and use the visible light picture to remind me what I am looking at a later time. When using the dual image overlay which is best in landscape mode, the SEEK and phone camera are usually positioned poorly in three ways. A) the thermal image and the phone camera image are at different zoom ratios B) the images do not line up next to each other in any useful way. I would find it useful to take a dual image picture while the thermal image of an object is fully viewable in half the display and the visible phone camera picture is also of the object in full display BUT this is NOT the case C) although you can zoom the phone camera in the dual overlay mode, doing so actually magnifies the thermal image as well, which make the feature even more useless. *If SEEK made the micro-usb with the ability to pivot slightly it would be extremely useful in order to line up pictures properly in dual image mode. Manual Zoom: The picture of my finger is set at the closest zoom. Even when scanning a building façade 250’ away, the best focus was at the middle of the range of focus available on the SEEK device. I will add more info as I see fit in the future.