The LEDs on cameras are kinda gimmicky - you need way more light for the tiny sensors in these cameras. They are kinda like the LED on your cell phone - how far out and bright is it really to get a good photo of someone not moving.... Go with true flood lights and a camera that can go into B/W IR if needed.
ALL cameras need light at night. Simple physics. Marketing a camera as low light and full color doesn't change that fact. As some folks are finding out, some of these cameras play with parameters that make them look nice and bright at night, but when there is motion, it is a complete blur and ghosting. I can make a crap camera look like noon at midnight by adjusting the parameters and make it look great as a still picture, but as soon as motion is introduced, it is blur and ghost city. How many perps will stop for 5 seconds so that your camera can get a clean shot of them...
If there isn't enough light, then you want to get a camera that has infrared, but then it will be B/W. Once you take it off auto settings, you will notice that the viewing distance isn't as advertised. Do you want 120 feet but it is all blurry or 25 feet but good clean images.
You would be surprised how much light these cameras need to stay in color at night (for the cameras that can switch to B/W with IR).
I have 33,000 lumen radiating off my house and I have to force my other cameras in color as it is not enough light for the camera to automatically stay in color at night. The sensors are small in cameras and need a lot of light.
I have enough light at this location that the LED white light on the camera didn’t make a difference. So with this 1/120 shutter speed, I wanted to see if the camera could perform with only the LED white light from the camera and the flood lights turned off. As you can see from this video, it barely recognized me at these settings. You would need to run 1/30 shutter with just the LED light light of the camera to be able to start to make a person out, but the image is way too dark and will start to be motion blur.
The average Joe will not spend the time to calibrate and will just leave the settings on auto and love the great still image they get and then just accept a blur/ghost motion at night. When do we need these to perform - at night!
Keep in mind that with the shutter at auto, it is a nice bright image, but motion was a blur...once you dial the camera in to actually be usable, you see the limitations...
When we had a thief come thru here and get into a lot of cars, the police couldn't use one video or photo from anyone's system that had fixed 2.8mm or 3.6mm cams - those cams sure looks nice and gives a great wide angle view, but you cannot identify anyone at 15 feet out. At night you cannot even ID someone from 10 feet which was how far the perp was from neighbors car when it got ransacked. Meanwhile, the perp didn't come to my house but walked past on the sidewalk at 80 feet from my house and my 2MP varifocal zoomed in to a point at the sidewalk was the money shot for the police that got my neighbors all there stolen stuff back.
Of course YMMV - as
@bigredfish points out - there are too many variables - some people have more light like street lights than others and many are running different shutter speeds and those two are the biggest influences on night captures. I cannot run many of mine at the same shutter as
@bigredfish
