Thermal imaging, coming to your boat eventually?
... written for Panbo by Ben Ellison and posted on May 5, 2009
This graph is a thermal sensor manufacturer's dream -- and was, in fact, created by the marketing department at FLIR -- but, hey, that's us way over to the right. I'd love to see the price of thermal cameras go so low, and unit volume so high, that "most cars/boats/ships" have them. Like GPS, once you understand how well the technology works, you want to have it aboard. I remember well the Magellan Nav 1000 (below), which seemed totally magic 20 years ago, but was actually quite crude and cost over $1,000...
Actually, thermal cameras are at least part way along that seductive price/adoption rate curve, largely driven by FLIR, which seems to dominate most aspects of the technology. Consider this little-known factoid about the recent
Maersk Alabama vs Somali pirates saga: FLIR thermal sensors were in use on the
USS Bainbridge (the Navy vessel that rescued the Captain),
and on the drones flying overhead,
and on the sniper rifles. I learned this because a FLIR representative recently visited Camden, and even set up
the new high res M626L on a hotel balcony. It's amazing how much more detail and range you get from 640x480 pixels than you do from 320x240, which is the norm for less-than-mega yacht thermal cams. The M-Series is what I'd like to install on
Gizmo's masthead, and use to learn what seeing with temperature, instead of light, really means. I think FLIR is going to let me do that, which is great, but, at $20,000, the M646L is four times the cost of
FLIR's entry level Navigator, and equates to the entire cost of a pretty good dual helm MFD system with radar, sonar, and a decent selection of NMEA 2000 sensors.
I do get a kick out of this image I found of what was arguably the first handheld GPS. I recall trying one on a delivery when Magellan first brought them out and, though "intuitive" did not apply, falling into a state of deep techno lust. Thermal imaging has already evolved to be a lot easier to use, but let's hope it follows this "white brick" down a steep cost/unit incline.
YIKES,
I was an early adapter of GPS and purchased a Trimble NavTrac GPS for something like $6,000. While it did work and was pretty basic and plotted a track on a lat lon grid (scalable) it's nothing compared to what you can get for 1/10th of the price today.
I don't buy the story that they have to charge a lot at first to recover their R&D costs. I'd rather think that if they have something hot they flood the market with it at the real price point and get the market excited and adapting it.
The NASA AIS class C was like that - cheap and got me into it and now I wait for the next level to come down in price.
Patience is a virtue.