On Wednesday, October 31, 2012 10:57:02 AM UTC-7, tm wrote:
"mike"
On 10/30/2012 3:00 PM, BeeJ wrote: Looking at FLIR handhelds to do a bunch of tasks including identifying hot components / traces. I also plan to use it for monitoring room air leaks and wall insulation. 1) are there any features of a particular FLIR model that is advantageous? 2) is there a place to get a better price break? New! One unit. Do the math. I'm gonna use round numbers, YMMV. If you want to look at a PCB with SMT devices, you may want 1mm resolution. If your IR scanner has 160pixel resolution, that gives you a 16cm field of view. That's close focus and the depth of field will be lousy. Will be useless for scanning a wall for leaks. More likely, affordable scanners will work fine for the wall leaks and be useless on small components. Unless you get an IR scanner with zoom and/or macro focus adjustment... or have a close-up lens made out of Germanium, it'll be hard to make both measurements with one device. People overestimate the temperature measurement capabilities of IR. Emissivity plays a big part when measuring random devices on a PCB. I did some experiments 30 years ago. Turns out that spraying a board with foot powder normalized the readings nicely. Problem was that the foot powder wouldn't wash off. Bummer... Kapton tape is very good for emissivity. Really works well when placed on a gold plated part. It is very black to long wave IR.

Some 20 years ago we found that ordinary black electrical tape [non shiny] gave excellent correlation to measurement with a contact probe on 'bright' metal parts when 'looking' with Fluke IR probe. Cheap and easily removed after testing.

Neil S.