Man, I love how te
chnology is progressing. My first cell phone was so big that my arm got tired toting it around – a dinosaur only Zack Morris could make look fashionable. The one I have now is tiny and has more processing power than my first home computer. Watching a movie at home used to be a chore. I had to rent a video tape, shove it into a 20 pound video tape player, adjust the tracking, rewind, fast-forward, and hope the tape didn’t get jammed. Now, I can press a few buttons on my remote and watch flicks that were in the theater only a few weeks ago. Innovations in technology seem to change weekly, and the infrared camera industry is no different.
As technology changes, there are new features added to products. Sometimes, new features can sneak up on you if you’re not careful. One new addition in thermal imagers, is the choice of which image format to use when saving files on your camera. On one hand - this is dang gone handy. If I know ahead of time I plan to use images for a Microsoft Office Word document or desktop publishing, I can choose a compatible format right out of the gate. I can skip monkeying with software and pull a JPEG right off the memory card. However, like many other neat things there’s also a downside.
When The Snell Group performs inspection work, we typically draw a camera from the home office (aka “The Mothership”) and we use what’s available. These cameras are the same ones we use in courses, so we get imagers with 400 saved files of functionality checks or practical exam images (do you remember those from your Level I course?). Sometimes the settings are all jacked up and you have to go through and fix everything. You get used to it, and after a while, checking a camera out is an automatic task. Thus, imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I got home from an inspection and went to download images. When I opened them in the software they looked different than they usually do. When I tried to open them to edit them, I couldn’t. Then I looked at the file extension. They were all in BMP format! Not what I wanted.
What’s the problem, you may ask? In some of the imagers, when you choose one of the formats used outside of the imaging software, such as JEPG, BMP or TIFF, you‘re stuck with the image as it is adjusted when you save it. Whatever level, span, palette settings you had when you clicked “store” are what you’ve got. Forever. If you don’t like the images, guess what? You’ve got to re-shoot them. If you performed an inspection a few hundred yards from your office, this may not be a big deal. However, if you’re like me and your inspection was 150 miles away, you’re making another trip to capture the image in the format you wanted. Not an ideal situation in which to find oneself.
Hence, make sure you’re set in the format you want. This is one of those lessons someone else paid for that you can benefit from. Trust me, having to return to take over images is not a fun task! What may seem like a neat addition to an infrared camera can cost you extra time and frustration if you’re not careful.
See you all next time – Think Thermally!