Seeking Spirit SLS camera review - £400 thermal imaging unit, worth it?

I've been looking at the Seeking Spirit SLS camera (think it's rebranded from a military thermal unit, but it's marketed specifically for paranormal investigation). It's about £400, which is a lot of money to spend on what's essentially a thermal imaging camera.

The reviews online are mixed - some paranormal investigators swear by them, others say you're just paying premium price for thermal imaging that regular cameras could do for half the cost.

Anyone here actually own one? Genuine question: is it worth £400 for paranormal investigation specifically, or are you better off buying a standard thermal camera from a tech shop and saving £200?

I'm planning a proper investigation kit and trying to work out priorities. Every penny counts when you're buying new equipment.

I have one and I'll be honest: you're paying for the form factor and the cultural capital of using 'paranormal-specific' equipment. The actual thermal imaging is no better than a CAT S60 smartphone (which costs £200 and also does thermal).

That said, I prefer having a dedicated unit because it looks more professional and it's robust. If you're on a budget though, get the thermal camera first and upgrade later if you need to.

think it's rebranded from a military unit

Yeah, it's a FLIR unit rebranded and marked up massively. FLIR cameras are excellent but they're expensive. You can get proper FLIR units for similar price directly from industrial suppliers if you don't care about the "paranormal investigation" packaging.

My advice: buy the cheapest thermal option that does what you need and invest in good night vision instead. You'll get better value across both.

I used a borrowed SLS once and it was impressive to use, but I couldn't tell you if it found anything paranormal that a regular thermal camera wouldn't have found. It did look cool on camera though, which might be the real selling point if you're documenting investigations.

The price is steep. I'd rent one first if possible, try it out on an investigation, then decide if you really need to own it.

The reason paranormal investigators use SLS specifically is the firmware is supposedly tuned for detecting humanoid shapes, not just heat signatures. Whether that's real or marketing, I can't tell you. But if that matters to your investigation method, it might justify the extra cost.

@AnomalousInverness that ". Tuned firmware". Claim is worth scrutinising carefully. Standard SLS cameras use Microsoft Kinect skeleton-mapping tech, which was designed to track living human movement patterns. The algorithm is notoriously prone to false positives - it'll map a humanoid skeleton onto curtains, cables, even uneven lighting gradients.

At £400 you're essentially paying for branding. A second-hand Kinect sensor plus dedicated capture software (like the free offerings paired with a decent laptop) gives you identical skeleton-mapping for under £50.

If thermal is what you actually want, a genuine FLIR Lepton-based unit or even a FLIR One Pro for mobile gives you far more reliable data for anomaly documentation. I've been running a FLIR E4 alongside a temperature differential logging setup in locations around the Peak District - the correlated data approach tells you far more than skeleton overlays ever will.

What specifically are you hoping to detect? That changes the recommendation considerably.