[CamperBob2]

It's worse than that, most likely. The cheapest FLIR cameras have 320x240 IR sensors, but they downsample to 80x60 unless you either pony up several thousand dollars for the E8 model or buy a $1000 E4 and hack it. There's no way they're enabling 320x240 IR imaging in a $350 iPhone peripheral. If they were, they'd be trumpeting it all over their marketing literature, rather than neglecting to mention resolution at all as they're doing.

And yes, launching this thing a few days before the iPhone 6 announcement is about the stupidest goddamn marketing move since the Osborne 1. Somebody needs to lose their job over that.

In FLIR's defense, 80x60 is still very useful for a lot of things. The ability to overlay low-resolution IR and moderate-resolution visual images is sort of a cheesy gimmick, but it makes the low-res IR sensors vastly more useful. (My E4 is hacked for 320x240 support, so I usually turn the MSX overlay off.)

[makomk]

It may be useful for a lot of things, but it's also a form of product segmentation that wouldn't be happening if there was actual proper competition in the market. 320x240 sensors appear to be cheaper than lower-res ones these days, which is probably why they're downsampling, and I think most of the intended applications benefit from the extra resolution, just not enough to justify ponying up several thousand dollars more.

[micampe]

Pick one: either it is a cheesy gimmick or it makes the sensor vastly more useful. Those are pretty much opposites, it can't be both.

[CamperBob2]

MSX is a band-aid to cover up low resolution IR. With 80x60 IR, MSX is a useful feature, because without it you often can't tell what you're looking at. But with 320x240 IR it's not needed in most cases. Worse, because the IR and visual lenses aren't coaxial, the resulting parallax error tends to actively deceive you about the exact location of small hot spots.

If FLIR didn't go out of their way to cripple the 320x240 sensors in their low-end models, MSX wouldn't be worth incorporating at all.