Well folks. I guess I will be a slight buzz kill with this cam. It's definitely not worse then 1st gen, but the improvements are so negligible that jumping to replace 1st gen is not worth while. Kind of think of going from Hikvision 3MP to 4MP, but even less obvious difference. Overall these are my findings:
Differences:
1. IR leds location has changed, two on top for long distance, two on the bottom for short distance
2. Firmware is pretty much identical. The only new difference I noticed is with the 2nd gen they added setting for 1280x720 & 1280x960 as your recording resolution
3. Night vision showed very little difference, there appears to be only minor improvement in terms of noise, but it's pretty much negligible. (I haven't tried in daylight yet)
Didn't have a better shared object to record so this is all I can do for now. Try to guess which one is which (NR is at 50%, default settings otherwise with 1080p@30fps 10000 Mbps, fully zoomed in at 10x)
Test setup
With all IR power (4 total)
No IR
With it's own IR (2 each)