Adding external lighting added so much to my cams:

bradner

Getting comfortable
Joined
Aug 15, 2019
Messages
426
Reaction score
757
Location
PNW
I've been upgrading a bunch of my older Dahuas with 1/1.8" 5442's from Andy and over the past couple weekends I've put up four external dawn to dusk LED yard lights (1X- 100W, 2x - 150W, 1x - 120W) around the property. WOW, have they upped my night image game with these new cameras!! I can now have 6 of my 5442's in full color mode at night with 6.66 - 8.33ms (1/120 - 1/150s) exposure time.

Luckily I don't have very close neighbors :cool: . My yard has been referred to as "the compound" lately by a house member. Hey, I bought the cameras to see things....

Here's a couple before/after pics with details that I knew about the cams at the time. It the shot of the house front, you can see the new side light shining in the background... I also blocked out the vehicle's license plate numbers as they were clearly readable. The first pic below was shot at ~10pm but I only just put up the camera and didn't set the time yet - hence showing year 2000.

The reason I stuck with the Unifi cams in spots is only because they had built-in audio. Now all my new 5442's have audio too!

With the longest exposure set to 6.66ms, I can get great clarity even when there's motion in the frame. I could increase the exposure to 8.33ms (1/120) and get a bit more light in the image but I think it's still good using 6.66ms.

Side Drive comparison.jpg

House front.jpg
 
Last edited:

aesterling

Getting comfortable
Joined
Oct 9, 2017
Messages
352
Reaction score
346
Very nice, I should probably do the same! Would love to see any “before and afters” you’d be willing to share!
 

bradner

Getting comfortable
Joined
Aug 15, 2019
Messages
426
Reaction score
757
Location
PNW
Very nice, I should probably do the same! Would love to see any “before and afters” you’d be willing to share!
I'll give it a go - problem I find with BI is that when I change a cam name, I seem to "lose" the previously saved clips from the old cam name somewhere...but I'll dig up something and post.

edit: added a couple pics to 1st post
 
Last edited:
Top