See Infrared LED Light with an iPhone 4...

Step 2: Now Try Using the Front-Facing FaceTime Camera to See Light from an Infrared LED

Now press the "switch cameras" icon in the upper right corner of the iPhone's Camera app so that the FaceTime camera's view is being displayed on the screen. You will probably see yourself on the screen.

Now point the FaceTime camera at the LED end of your TV remote control and press a button on the remote.

Your eye can't see the IR light, but now you will see the IR light appear in the viewfinder as a bright white light.

It turns out that the FaceTime camera on an iPhone 4 does NOT have IR filtering on it! Yay!

I hope this is useful to even just one person in the Instructables community. Please use this information for good, and not for evil.

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c0deater says: Apr 26, 2012. 8:25 PM

i can also confirm this works on both cameras of the motorola atrix 4g,.

Gelfling6 in reply to c0deaterMay 7, 2012. 3:14 PM

As someone else stated, most digital cameras are immediately IR sensitive.. Even webcams on PC's, Laptops.. The majority of heat detector cameras used by the fire service, are based on a simple CCD array chip, as someone else noted, without a IR filter. I've done this to test IR remotes, IR-Xfer modules for laptops, PDA's, Even outdoor security cameras which have the lenses surrounded with IR-LED's.. (you should see how they look when driving by a place you know has a camera.. the whole doorway lights up!) I can't remember where I saw it, but someone had a hack, which required scraping the IR filter off the lens of one of the 'one-time-use' digital camcorders from CVS. (Pure Digital, of which the Kodak, & FliP cameras are based.) A wee bit distructive, if you're not careful.. But, even with the IR filter in place, they're still pretty sensitive.

Light_Lab in reply to Gelfling6Sep 23, 2012. 4:18 PM

Typically CCD cameras are sensitive only up to ~1000nm or so. This means they are really near infra red (NIR) cameras. As such they are not very sensitive to heat. Heat detector cameras are true infrared cameras and sensitive to much longer wave lengths. Part of this is due to special lens materials used (eg Indium) which is much more transparent to IR than glass and plastic.