Remember when smartphones only had one camera on the back? One lens, one sensor, take it or leave it? Well, to say that things have gotten a little nutty since then is nothing short of an understatement, and these days the expectation is that a well-rounded phone needs to offer multiple cameras: ultrawide, telephoto, or maybe even variable optical zoom. For all those options, though, we’re still talking about cameras that only capture visible light — and isn’t that just so, like, narrow, man? There’s a whole, big electromagnetic spectrum out there, and with FLIR’s new One Edge Pro, your phone can start taking advantage of it, snapping thermal pics in the infrared.
FLIR has been making thermal cameras for ages, and beyond fancy industrial and defense systems, a few years back it set its sights on the smartphone market with FLIR One add-on cameras. We went hands-on with the FLIR One Pro, which attached to the USB-C port on the bottom of your phone and let you capture thermal images, perform measurements, and maybe even tackle some tricky home maintenance projects. Now with the FLIR One Edge Pro, the company is addressing a few of the shortcomings we noticed with that last model.
The big change is the form factor, and rather than attaching to the bottom of your phone, the Edge Pro grabs onto the back, holding in place with a spring-loaded arm — not unlike how a selfie stick might hug your phone. That means the camera no longer needs the USB port for data, and instead streams its imagery to your phone wirelessly. Battery life also gets an upgrade (a good thing, we figure, with all that wireless data), and while we only saw under an hour with the FLIR One Pro, the Edge Pro intends to double that.
Considering that a big use for a product like this is going to be homeowners looking to identify problems with insulation, overheating wires, or tracking down leaks, the ability to detach the One Edge Pro from your phone and maneuver it in hard-to-reach spaces sounds like a major improvement. You can even hang it somewhere and leave it in place to get a remote view, streamed to your phone.
Not everything gets an upgrade here, though, and the thermal image sensor is still the 160 x 120 resolution component we got with the One Pro, with a frame rate that’s still quite limited. This new model may not reinvent the wheel, but that also means it does more of what we already liked — such as that cool “MSX” mode that overlays image data from the visible camera to make the thermal image much, much easier to read. And we’ve got enhancements in software to look forward to, like guided modes for tackling some of those home upkeep projects.
Pricing could still be an issue, and at $550 this model is a good $100 more than the One Pro. That said, the usability improvements seem easy to appreciate, and if a tool likes this saves you from hiring an expensive contractor, it might just pay for itself in a short while. Sales start November 10, direct from FLIR and on Amazon, and units should start shipping closer to the end of the year.
