Smartphone night vision in a tiny package

Seek Thermal gives you the thermal technology that was once only available for the military and other professionals. It's a tiny camera that attaches to your smartphone so you can get a thermal image of anything around you, showing you a temperature snapshot of your environment.
There are plenty of awesome real-world uses for Seek. For DIY and home-repair enthusiasts, the camera can help you see problems inside pipes or see where heat is escaping from around windows or doors. Home cooks can use it to check out their grill's hot and cool spots. Seek is also useful for home security, to see if any unwanted animals or humans are getting into your back yard at night.
At $250, the price is a bit steep, but Seek's versatility makes up for it. Though I wouldn't buy this device just for entertainment, it was very fun to review it because the images you can capture are just plain cool. It's worth noting that professional thermal-imaging tech can cost thousands of dollars, so the Seek is one of the first systems to make this kind of gear more accessible to the masses.
The Seek Thermal system includes a camera attachment for your Android or iOS device and an app that shows what the camera captures. I'll talk about the camera first.
Seek sells two smartphone camera attachments, the $250 Thermal camera and the $300 Thermal Xtra Range (XR), both available for iOS or Android devices. The difference between the two is that the XR can see objects twice as far as the original camera, with the same clarity and the XR has a manual focus feature. For the iPhone, you need to have a Lightning connector and iOS 7 or 8. For Android, you just need to run Jelly Bean 4.3.1 or later. For this review, I tested the original model Android camera and app.
The Seek camera is tiny and plugs right into your smartphone. Josh Miller/CNET
Seek's original thermal camera is tiny, about 1.6 inches long, 0.8 inch tall and 0.6 inch thick and it weighs just 0.5 ounce (14 grams). The chalcogenide lens is offset to the left side and on the right is the connector that you plug into your phone's Micro-USB port. Its tiny size makes it easy to slip into a pocket, but it also means that it's easy to lose it. And if you're spending $250 on it, you don't want to do that.
Thankfully, Seek also includes a well-made carrying case with a soft rubber interior that keeps the camera safe when you're not using it. It also has a loop on one side so that you can attach the case to a keychain or hang it from a workbench. The snap clasp is strong and sturdy so that it won't unlatch in your bag.
Once you've installed the Seek Thermal app (more about that below), using the camera is as simple as plugging it into your phone. The app will launch automatically and on Android you may need to authorize it to communicate with the camera. It's an easy setup that takes just a few seconds each time you want to use the Seek.
The Seek camera works in daylight or at night, basically in any light level, because it doesn't need visual light. Instead, it picks up the infrared waves that everything -- whether it's living or not -- emits. We can't see those waves with our naked eyes, so Seek turns those waves into a visual image, using color. Those IR waves can be used to determine temperature variations around you, so the colors you see with the Seek correspond to different temperatures around you. The effect is really neat to look at, and useful for seeing things normally hidden from our sight.
Seek relies on a tiny sensor chip and a software algorithm to create these thermal images. It captures 32,000 pixels with every shot and each pixel takes a different temperature measurement to create the whole photo or video. The camera can detect temperatures from -40 degrees Fahrenheit to 626 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 degrees Celsius to 330 degrees Celsius), which should fit all of your thermal needs.
A thermal selfie taken with the Seek. Sarah Mitroff/CNET
The photos and video that the Seek camera take aren't high-res by a long shot, at just 206 by 156 pixels. However, you can still make out some detail, especially if you hold the camera still for a few seconds before you snap a photo, so the lens can calibrate. In the test shots I took, most were a bit blurry, but in several I could capture smaller, identifying details. You can use the camera to see a thermal image in real time on your phone's screen, or take photos and video to look at later.
The camera uses an automatic black body shutter to keep the lens calibrated, and it makes a soft clicking noise that you can hear every few seconds. That shutter is different than the onscreen shutter you use to capture a still photo in the app, and in fact, you can't control the black body shutter at all; it's designed to run on its own.
Seek works best when you hold the camera still, whether you're taking photos or video. I found that if I moved the lens around too much, there was significant ghosting, meaning the thermal image would linger on my phone's screen after I pointed it at something new until the shutter clicked again. It takes a few seconds for the lens to focus on a new subject, so you need to be a bit patient when using the camera. I also found that the camera works better in low lighting because that way the heat from lamps or sunlight won't skew the image.
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