FLIR One – Unboxing Testing And Review

This post was originally published on November 16, 2016
The latest update to this post was made 7 years ago.

FLIR One – Unboxing Testing And Review

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The FLIR One is a thermal imaging camera attachment for your smartphone.  It is currently available for Android based phones with a micro USB connector and for Apple phones with lightning connectors.  [FLIR Website] – FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared Radiometer) is a thermal camera allowing you to look at the comparison of heat in any given surrounding.  The FLIR One has a camera alongside a thermal imager to produce easily recognized and outlined heat images.  After seeing the FLIR cameras and the price tags to go along with them, my initial question was whether or not this small smartphone add-on would really work…

As it turns out, the [FLIR One] is one of the most useful tech tools that I’ve tested to date!  Not only does it work, but it works really well!  It has a lot of built in features which can help multiple trades do their jobs even better.  A computer technician can see if a power supply on a PC is overheating.  An HVAC guy can find where the duct work isn’t sealed properly.  An electrician can locate a faulty circuit breaker and so much more!  All of these things can be done easily with the FLIR One.

With a street price of $249.95 for either the Android or Apple version, we couldn’t pass up this opportunity to try it out!  The app is free from the app store on your iOS device or the Google Play store on Android, simply called “Flir One”.  We were happy to see features like the much more expensive FLIR models offer, such as the ability to take a photo, shoot video, record a panorama and even shoot a time-lapse.  It also offered 9 different shooting modes (Iron, Gray, Rainbow, Contrast, Arctic, Lava, Wheel, Coldest and Hottest).  Each of these modes offering a different view in contrast from coldest to hottest.

In our tests, we used the Android version on our Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.  It ran decently and picture quality was fairly reasonable.  Video performance was a bit laggy, but still overall not too bad.  On any of the images below, you can click for a larger version (if available).  To start, the packaging is very simple…

Shown: Android version unboxing.

The contents include the FLIR One camera module and a protective carrying case with a charging cable (it did not include the wall power brick, but it uses the same one your phone uses or any available USB port to charge). The device will need to be charged before using it, as I found out after two seconds of initial use before it shut off! It’s important to note that the unit does not use the phones power to run itself, but rather charges separately. The Android version charges with a standard Micro USB charging cable, where as the iOS (Apple) version charges with the lightning connector.

Android FLIR One (Front)

Android FLIR One (Back)

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