Yes this type of technology is primarily surface temparature detection, but it depends on the material and internal temparature being observed, and obviously internal temperatures can radiate to the surface. A lot of the cost is in the labour time to produce and test. If you look at the nearest rival products they are priced from about 5K-10K. What makes this technology cheaper is that it uses a low resolution (16x16) detector, this may sound low but with clever interpolation the output display is 128x128 and is more than adequate for many applications.
The cheapest range is the 1011 series which the main housing is a tough plastic rather than metal. The standard 1011 is £1000 but the accuracy is not defined - its not neccessarily wrong or far out, its just been tested less than the high accuracy model 1021 which is defined as +- 2 degrees C and this costs £1500, there is also a high temparature version 300-1000 degrees C, 1031 which costs £2000.
On PC there is latency of around 5ms and the output is at 8 FPS, pocket PCs are a little slower because of their limited processing power.
website
Here
anyone interested should call the sales team for a chat, they will be happy to talk to you.
Andy.