With this inaugural blog post, I thought it would be good to reflect on something that I feel was an important change that occurred in the infrared industry over the last decade. Even though my career started after the days of using liquid nitrogen/compressed gas (examples, right) or “portable cameras” that one rolled around on a dolly, equipment design was still fairly terrible when I joined The Snell Group in 2002. Most thermal imagers in use at the time seemed to require an engineering degree to operate the menu system or the strength of an Olympic weight lifter just to hold it steady.
While many industries have for years employed focus groups and marketing research teams to design products, that concept seemed entirely lost on the manufacturers of infrared cameras back then. To be fair, this was obviously before many of the advancements in camera design and engineering that we take for granted today. New lightweight materials are now routinely used to construct an imager’s housing. The low-cost and high-quality of un-cooled detector technology is now commonplace. Even battery design has radically advanced compared to what was available then. I recall using some batteries that weighed as much as two or three of today’s infrared cameras put together. Some models today literally take AAs, or batteries similar in size, and last three times as long. All of this has helped improve the imaging experience for the thermographer and provided us with a number of comfortable to use, and easy to handle, cameras that we could only have dreamed of at the time.
Maybe not as obvious, but in my opinion one of the larger drivers of this change, is the greater emphasis on product design from the manufacturers. Yes, marketers deserve a lot of credit for this too. They do more than just design ads or brochures. Before a new camera makes its debut, a particular model has been researched, designed, engineered, prototyped, tested, re-designed/engineered, field tested, etc. so that when it finally arrives, it is a proven product thanks to countless hours of vetting. That process includes the efforts of marketing teams that push for improvements in ergonomics and weight, the addition of voice recording, or even whether or not to include the built-in laser pointer. It takes a lot of thought, time and money and marketing drives a lot of that development.
Yes, things certainly are better for thermographers thanks to the efforts of better product design, but I ask those who are in marketing in the industry to please be careful and not get carried away. As a training organization, we are constantly battling the perception that “no training is needed” because systems are now “so easy” to operate or, because cameras now cost relatively little, “minimal training is required”.
Granted, there is a lot of misinformation out there in the public about how infrared works. I routinely see the technology abused on television, most recently by my favorite TV spy who used it to see through the walls of a building to count the number of bad guys inside. You could see their bodies just as clearly as if the walls were made solely of thin-film plastic.
Camera manufacturers, though, are not helping themselves, or the industry, for that matter when they add a “feature” that purports to identify areas of missing insulation using a built-in detection function. By entering certain environmental parameters, the camera’s on-board computer shows the thermographer where insulation is supposedly missing in the wall via an isotherm effect. I have to ask why is this even necessary? I’d like to know the benefit this provides when apparent insulation voids are so obviously visible (image, above) to the trained thermographer in a standard image with the right conditions and a proper span and level setting.
This attempt to “improve” a product beyond what is really necessary and, as in this case, remove trained critical thinking from the operator, is hopefully just an anomaly, but I fear not in a highly competitive industry. And this phenomenon is not just limited to the world of infrared. It is a cliché that is universally understood by everyone in business.
One of my all time favorite Dilbert cartoons depicts a marketing executive finding a magazine and, upon reading it, wonders if engineering can build a space station. Aware of this development, the engineering team scrambles to take him out as Dilbert announces “there’s nothing more dangerous than a marketing person with a little bit of knowledge”.
This scenario is similar to what I feel has played out with the design of some infrared cameras in recent years. I could be wrong, but am convinced it is why many cameras now contain emissivity tables. Why? Well, likely marketing asked for it, it was easy to add and is a “value-added feature” that can be listed in a brochure or touted at a trade show. Forget the fact that an untrained, or even a Level I thermographer for that matter, has no business ever utilizing it.
Now what I’m certainly not saying here is don’t innovate. I’m just hoping that those involved with IR camera development resist the urge to continue “reading that magazine”. Just because a camera MIGHT be able do something doesn’t mean it SHOULD. Stop worrying about adding emissivity tables, insulation detection features, and other arguably useless functions. Innovate instead in the areas that matter such as better software design for analyzing images and facilitation of report generation. When it comes to cameras, stick to what you have been doing really well now for a number of years…providing us with quality infrared systems that are lightweight, easy to handle and comfortable to operate. Leave the insulation detection features and other extraneous items to those “systems” that work best; the properly trained thermographer who doesn’t need a computer to tell them what they should already know.