Compact electronics have become the norm, but there's still room for surprise. The Thermal Master P2 certainly fits in that category. It's one of the smallest thermal imaging cameras on the market, but it packs a lot of functions into its compact volume.
Whether for practical purposes, education, or you just think it would be really cool to have Predator vision, thermal imaging is a way to see the world in a whole new way. Using infrared light generated by an object's heat, it can not only make a cup of tea stand out in a pitch black room, it can also provide all sorts of useful information for everything from security to advanced circuit board diagnosis.
They also make for some of the weirdest selfies and pet photos ever snapped.
Of course, to see such thermal images you need a thermal camera. Things have come a long way from the days when such instruments were huge, blocky things that had to be placed on a stand or carried on the shoulder to use. Today, there are any number of small thermal cameras on the market with varying degrees of size and capability, but Thermal Master has added extreme compactness combined with high resolution to its range of cameras for thermography, automotive, and hunting applications.
When I received the P2 for review, I was curious as I opened the rather posh packaging. Removing the instruction manual, I found a small plastic jewel-like object that I thought was the camera. It was about the size I expected, but I couldn't find the lens or see how it would attach to a smartphone or similar device.
I then realized that what I was holding was, in fact, the storage case. As I fiddled with the catch to open it, I got an object lesson in how small it was as it slipped out of my hand and I managed to catch it in midair before my dog could snap it up as a treat.
When I got the case open, I found the camera itself, which measures only 27 × 18 × 9.8 mm (1.1 x 0.71 x 0.39 in) and weighs 9.7 g (0.34 oz). After downloading and installing the camera's app on my devices, I discovered that the P2 wouldn't fit on my phone because the latter is in a rubber anti-shock case that prevented the phone from reaching the port, so I had to order a small extender adapter (I later found the USB-C extension cord that comes with the P2 in the box along with a carabiner that fits a small loop on the storage case).
As I waited for the extender to arrive, I installed the P2 on my tablet and gave it a preliminary test. While the image quality was very good, I found the app jerky and difficult to use. This problem vanished entirely when I was able to install the camera on my phone.
The P2 is currently only designed to work with Android 6.0 and above. Though the app required the usual routine of granting permissions and so forth to install, it was fairly intuitive once it was set up. It can also be configured to run the moment the camera is plugged into the USB port.
Since the camera draws power from your phone, battery life isn't an issue, and it's rated to run five to seven hours on a 3,000 to 5,000-mAh phone. It also ups the IR resolution for such a small device to 256×192 pixels at 12μm and can measure temperatures between -14 °F and～1,112 °F (-10 °C to ～600 °C). However, the P2 is not very robust. The maker warns against shocks, wet, and magnetic fields. In addition, it warns to avoid pointing at high temperature sources like the sun or open flames. They're out of the camera's range anyway and they're likely to damage the ThermalMaster sensor chip. I got a scolding from the app when I looked briefly at a candle flame.
The party piece is not only the resolution, but the control you have over the images and videos captured. There is a 15x optical zoom and the color can be displayed in a wide range of formats to show off the data as you desire, including black-for-hot, white-for-hot, as well as various mixtures of red, green, and blue. There's also a feature to numerically display the temperature at a particular point, the range along a line, or within a square or circle, as well as sounding an alarm when a particular temperature is encountered.
In putting it through its paces, it turned out that the P2 could perform many tasks, aside from making freaky pictures. It was sensitive enough to see the heat imprint of a hand that had sat on a surface for only a few seconds, the outline of a body in a chair that had been left several minutes ago, and even a line of dog tracks on a carpet. It could see the heat of a recently parked car down to the tires, the slight heat from an electrical circuit in great detail, and leakage from a hot water heater.
Though I haven't tried it yet, I suspect that the P2 would be very good for spotting wildlife or for locating fresh deposits when walking the dog at night.
In all, there are a wide variety of applications for such a small, high-resolution thermal imager and its small size means that it can always be readily available. The only large reservations are the questions of its durability under field conditions and the fact that its very compactness can be a drawback as well as an asset. This is definitely one gadget to keep in the box it came in if you don't want to be rummaging about in drawers hunting for it on the night.
The P2 is currently at a Black Friday price of US$189.00 until December 2, down from the regular $249 price.
Product page: Thermal Master
