Disclosure: I bought this with my own money, and was not paid to do this review. Too Long; Didn't Read: If you're interested in a thermal camera 'specifically' then the Seek Shot Pro is worth serious consideration. If you are more interested in building reports and fitting into the Flir world, maybe you should think about the C2 or C3, but you will be taking a huge hit on every significant feature to be part of the mainstream. Honestly, this is a truly impressive device for the money! Background: Right off the bat I want to acknowledge that I am not a thermography expert. However, I am an individual who has been very interested in the field since I was a child (which was a minute or two ago), and when the original Seek Thermal (now the Seek Thermal Compact) came out for iPhone back in 2015 (finally a thermal camera at a price point I could manage to afford) I pre-ordered mine. It was both really cool and a bit of a letdown. The refresh rate (9hz) wasn't what I was accustom to from normal cameras, and between the resolution (206x156, 32 kilopixels) and the fact I wasn't used to working with thermal graphs (nor did it have any sort of mix mode) it was very difficult to workout what I was looking at. All the same, it proved to be an invaluable tool when troubleshooting in a verity of situations. For instance, when working with computer systems and you're concerned you are adequately cooling all of the various chips, instead of having to hand check each package and move to the next, you can easily sweep the camera over the area, and any potential issues will immediately stand out. Likewise with 3D printers. It was easy to see if any component might be overheating, or perhaps not getting hot enough. Then there were automotive applications. Basically though, most systems, be them mechanical, electrical, or structural, are thermally sensitive in one manor or another. It's really nice to be able to do a quick sweep with a thermal camera and pull your attention to potential trouble areas so you can spend more time finding a solution than looking for the problem. Impressions: Coming from the original Seek Thermal, which I was pleased with, I am truly blown away with this camera! Why? One of the things I never cared for about the original Seek was that I had to hook it up to an iPhone or an iPod or something. That made the entire process tedious. First I would have to have both devices with me. Then the dongle wouldn't fit while the phone was in the case. After I did what I had to to connect the two, I would have to fire up the app, and hope an iOS update or something hadn't broken the software. So I just resorted to using it with my old iPad I never update, so I could keep my expensive iPhone in its case, but that turned into another device I needed to have. Suffice it to say, there was a lot of friction in using the original Seek. That lead to me only pulling it out when I absolutely felt I had to do a thermal analysis of a situation, even then I'd put it off. So when Seek released a standalone thermal camera in a form-factor I liked (something about the size and shape of a quick-shot camera) I was very interested. The question then became, do I get the standard one or do I spend the extra money to step up to more resolution? With the resolution of the original camera, which was already class leading (206x156, 32 kilopixels), and is shared with the regular Seek Shot, I wasn't sure the extra resolution (320x240, 76.8 kilopixels) was really needed. I'm still not sure the extra resolution is "needed," as in, will allow you to do what you couldn't otherwise, but BOY IS IT HELPFUL! I took a look around at various scenes and instantly could understand what I was looking at! The extra pixels and the extra field of view (57* vs 36*) resulted in a HUGE improvement in scene recognition. What was previously a chore to understand was now effortless! Which of course greatly increases both the enjoyment of using the device as well as greatly decreases the time you need to make meaningful use of it. Also, if you want to share the results, it will be even more useful when sharing with people who aren't accustom to dealing with resolution limitations. So I think the 149% premium to step up to the Pro is certainly worth the 240% improvement in resolution, and the 158% improvement in field of view! How about the Seek Shot vs the Seek Thermal Compact? Well the difference in terms of price is 188%, but it's hard to do a simple comparison like I did between the Pro Shot and the standard Shot. I guess it depends on how much you use it. But then, the inconvenience of the Compact will encourage you to use it less, whereas the convenience of the Shot will encourage you to use it more. So you could argue that buying the Shot will help you recognize a better return on investment, as you'll use it more. Of course, if you simply aren't going to use it all that much regardless, why spend the extra? But if you're not going to use it much why buy it at all? There is also the fact that the Shot is a standalone tool which will never be out of date (that is rendered unusable). With dongles you are tied to smart device of some sort, and you better hope the physical interface doesn't change and that the required software continues to be available and functioning. Personally, I would steer away from a dongle solution if I could. It's a lot of risk (of losing functionality altogether) and a lot of extra friction in actual use (headache dealing with it). - UPDATE 9/4/19: There is a use case for the Seek Thermal Compact I didn't consider. You can place the Seek Thermal Compact on an extension cable, and decouple the camera from the screen. This can be useful is viewing hard to reach areas. Also, if you want to take selfies, or deal with other situations where you can't both see the viewscreen, and line up the shot. - What do I think of the UI? I think it's pretty straight forward and easy to figure out. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a higher end camera, but for the money, it's impressively feature rich. You can compare regions, do min:max, get area averages, adjust your coloring, they have a mixed mode (sort of like Flir MDX) but unlike Flir it's not as much of a requirement to make sense of the scene. The interface is a little slow compared to modern smart phones, but considering the fact the scene only refreshes at 9hz anyway (a limitation the uncooled microbolometer technology that this sort of passively cooled consumer price point requires) why spend the money on extra processing power to make the interface snappier (and decrease battery life by doing so) when the device is inherently not going to be fast anyway (as a limitation of the sensor)? Objections: Ok, so that's it for context. Now I want to address some of the concerns I've seen placed against this product. First is the statement that this product in inaccurate or has a lot of noise. (Separate issues, sort of, but related.) It's worth bearing in mind that this is a passively cooled high resolution high range thermal camera, and if that statement alone doesn't impress you, then you don't really understand how hard making something like that is! This camera gets compared to the Flir C2 and C3 (which the C3 was the same price before they dropped it to compete), these two cameras have a resolution of 80x60 or 4.8 kilopixels, which compared to the Seek Shot Pro with a resolution of 320x240 or 76.8 kilopixels, are only one sixteen the resolution! Which if you don't think that resolution matters, you could always get a point measuring heat gun! Of course resolution matters a lot in photography, even thermal photography, that is after all what actually produces a picture, the available array of points which form the image! If you don't feel it makes a difference go look for images on Google that are 80x60 and compare them to images that are 320x240, and see the difference that it makes. The next point to co
