LPR especially at night will only see plate and head/ taillights and not people unless you have stadium quality light. It is not an overview camera also.
See the LPR subforum.
Distance to plate?
Manual read or the camera read and log?
Camera suggestion cannot be made until those are answered.
It really depends on the distance from the camera to the target license plate zone. You need a tightly framed image (perhaps car sized or smaller) in order to get good plates. As wittaj noted, your nighttime settings will need to be such that you will generally get a completely black image except when a car passes. This is because the exposure has to be set to keep the license plate from being overexposed (blown out). This means other things will be extremely dark and won't be visible on the footage. All this means you should plan on using a dedicated license plate camera. Do not expect to be able to use that camera for any other purpose - like identifying people.
Thought I would throw together a post on my experiences so far with LPR in an effort to help others that are considering running down that rabbit hole. There are some practical considerations you should know about LPR. I am approaching this from the position of using Blue Iris and Plate...
Introduction This thread is about my journey into LPR (License Plate Recognition) after having about 18 months of experience with IP cams and having quite a bit of my system finished. I am not an expert on LPR, or IP cameras either. But I have spent a lot of time working with my system and...
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The Z12 is what most of us use around here. I can get faces of people on the sidewalk during the daytime no problems. Just depends on your angle. No faces at night though. Shutter runs too fast.