Review on 🌡️ MASTERCOOL Blue Infrared and Contact Thermometer 52226 by Sean Vazquez

I bought this neat little thermometer because I loved the idea of having both a probe and an IR scanner in the same housing , very convenient appeared . And the! Small and flat enough to carry around, this thermometer is extremely useful in the kitchen. The probe reads 211 degrees in a pot of boiling water in about 10 seconds, so seems pretty accurate and fast, and the IR sensor also seems accurate in all the things I've used it for so far. However, there are a few oddities that deserve discussion. First, the location of the IR sensor is really inconvenient. To really scan something properly, you have to turn the thermometer upside down and then read the temperature on the inverted display. Reading numbers upside down isn't really a difficult task, but it's still a bit odd. The probe is also a bit awkward to use as it only rotates in one plane, but not as weird as an IR scanner. Also, the LCD has a very strange viewing angle. It intentionally seems best readable when rotated 45 degrees away from you, rather than looking straight ahead. I assume this should somehow mitigate the weirdness of the IR scanner's awkward placement, but it doesn't. In order to scan something while reading the display from what appears to be a suggested angle, you need to scan the object of interest from the front or front-bottom. In the kitchen, however, you need to scan things from top to bottom. Scanning from the front is usually not possible due to the walls of the pot and pan. Ironically, holding the thermometer upside down and scanning straight into the pan is actually the perfect viewing angle. But then, as I mentioned before, the display is upside down! The biggest problem with this thermometer is that it doesn't have an aiming laser like the gun IR thermometer. Also, the documentation for this thermometer specifically states that there is a 1:1 ratio between the distance from the IR sensor to your target and the width of the target being scanned. That is, the IR sensor picks up infrared light in a cone of about 90 degrees. I'm by no means an expert on IR thermometers, so I have no idea if pistol-style IR thermometers also scan in such a wide cone, or if they have significantly narrower targets. In any case, the guide laser and the much narrower IR sensor were what I expected. So if that's what you expect from this thermometer, don't. However, with its wide sensor it's still quite usable - in some ways even more useful, as you can either bring the thermometer very close to the object you're interested in to get a specific reading, or move it further away , to be precise proof. Get an average reading over a larger area (e.g. the entire surface of the pan). And the last thing: the body of the thermometer is very sparse. There are only 3 buttons, a very basic LCD that only shows 2 numbers, and lots of thick blue plastic. At first it seemed cheap to me, but after some time of working it seems more durable and practical now. I shamelessly keep it in my pocket or accidentally drop it on the kitchen floor, as the thick plastic casing and lack of unnecessary bells and whistles make it unlikely that anything will break. The clip on the back also feels relatively stable and should it break, the entire clip mechanism can be unscrewed and removed, so you don't have to look like a loser with a broken clip thermometer. I think the convenience of having both a thermometer probe and an IR thermometer in the same body is enough to give this device 5 stars despite its minor quirks. You could probably find a better probe thermometer or IR thermometer, but not both in the same package unless you pay a lot more.