[Maker’s Fun Duck] has a recent video review of a cheap thermal camera from a company called Kaiweets, which you can see below. It checked all of his boxes: It was standalone, handheld, cheap, and not too cheap. The question is: does it work well for the kinds of things we would do with such a camera?

That’s a tricky question, of course, because everyone’s uses are different. Considering a soldering iron. A tiny one is great for working on PCBs, but lousy for soldering large coax connectors. A soldering gun works well for that purpose, but is too much for the PCB. The same goes for thermal cameras. Some are great for, for example, finding leaky parts of houses, but might not be so great at locating defective components on a PCB.

[Duck] starts out looking at coffee cups and hand prints. But he quickly moves on to printed circuit boards like a 3D printer controller. He also provides a number of tips on how to get accurate readings.

He seems to like the camera. But your use case might be different. There are some advantages to having cameras connected to your phone, for example, and there are other considerations. The camera appears to have a 256×192 resolution and can connect to a PC. It retails on the street for around $250.

Small cameras are valuable, even if you need to cable them to a phone. Like many things, thermal cameras get better and cheaper every year.