[jacquesm]

That's a good point. I wonder how much you could coax out of a regular camera by putting an IR pass filter in front of it to filter out all the other wavelengths and then using a long exposure.

That might be a dirt cheap way to get a passable IR cam.

[CamperBob2]

You can see some IR sources like remote-control IR LEDs with a conventional CCD camera, but you'd do it by removing its existing IR filter rather than adding one. The IR cameras being discussed here respond to much longer wavelengths, though, and yield completely different results. The black-body spectrum for thermal IR has far too little energy at the frequencies that traditional CCD cameras are sensitive to.