Thread: Carrying thermal monocular in the bush

Can anyone enlighten me please as to whether the colour temperatures on any of the thermal imaging handhelds owned and used for hunting are manually adjustable? Or are they typically fixed and factory preset? Or do they move based on the average IR frequency & intensity being received across the sensor?

If factory preset then presumably it can be observed that the colours have indeed been "hard wired" while being optimised for distinguishing the body temperature of mammals, perhaps in a surrounding environment that goes down to 0°C? This might mean that typically objects above say 35°C would all be of the one colour (of what ever colour palette has been selected) and 0°C and below would also all be the one colour, with the image being made up of the colours between these two extremes.

If operating in an environment where the overnight temperature only dipped to 15° (setting aside radiated losses to below this for now) then it seems that a chunk of the palette would no longer be available in contributing to the image. So perhaps the imagers instead are self-calibrating based on averaging, with the palette being automatically allocated to better depict IR frequencies that are typically emitted from objects between 15°C and 35°C?

Anyone able to offer any insights please ?