Ah, that is the misconception. What everyone wants is that megapixel view that includes a plate number all that is around it and I've shown that is possible during the day with a cheapy 3MP camera and a 12mm lens. The problem is at night. You have to expose for the plate to see it, when you do that, all else is very dark. People expect that if they expose for a nice picture, the plate will be fine, but then they see the plate is just a white blank rectangle and headlights blow everything out and don't realize they need to make the image much darker, but by doing so, it's worthless for anything other than capturing plates, so why have 1080P or 3MP when there are 720P or VGA cameras that have way better low light sensitivity. To give you an idea, some cameras made for this have a max exposure of 1/500th of a second. I've used general purpose cameras between 1/90th an 1/250th of second max exposure to be able to read plates. Of course you have to reduce gain way down otherwise you just get a noisy worthless image.
We use an Axis Q1604 + 5-50mm Fujinon lens and an Axis housing. It is 720p, but sort of waste to use 720P because to get the best capture, I have to limit the view to about the width of the car and VGA is plenty for that field of view. In it of itself, it does not do too bad with lighting just from the license plate lights. But with a Raytec RM100 illuminator, we can actually see the car and not just the plate. I set it to 4fps and we get about 2-4 plates captures as the car drives by, That would be good up to 30-40mph, faster would require a higher frame rate.
Which camera is that?