Another excellent video Mike. Thank you.
Thanks also for your suggestion on opening ultrasonic welded plastic cases....I have eight knackered FLIR batteries to open up !
With regard to the poor user interface I am surprised. There is no excuse for sluggish menus in 2013 and the poor control pad functionality should have been discovered during UAT.
My FLIR camera has a small joystick whose function changes depending upon the menu function selected. For example, at start-up the joystick controls focus and zoom. If the manual image set-up menu is selected, the joystick controls centre temperature and span. As you state, it is common sense that the joy-pad should have commonly used functions assigned to it during normal use. Hopefully FLIR will consider some firmware updates to correct this oversight.
With regard to the 'FLIR Tools' software. It is a universal program for most of the cameras in FLIR's portfolio. It even works with my 1990's TIC's
The functions that you could not activate in the view mode are for Thermographic cameras that contain a lot of embedded information in the recorded image files. My cameras produce proprietary FLIR .img and standard BMP files but not jpg. The .img files are the only ones that contain the thermographic data that FLIR Tools uses.
You can see plots of temperature across a scene and other stuff that Industry needs. I actually prefer Explorer99 that was released in 1999(updated 2007). It does the job without fuss.
The real advantage of these software programs is that they can re-process the raw thermal image data, including changing centre temperature, span and the colour palettes may be changed to ones not available on the camera. Various measurements on the image may be carried out post inspection.
I am impressed with the improvement in image recognition that the MSX offers. I can see this becoming standard fitment on TIC's in the future. It is very clever that FLIR offers the image registration adjustment. A pretty decent 'budget' TIC.