Axton PoE Illuminator review

@wittaj

Here is a shot from the Overview cam with the Axton IR off:
Overview 2021-02-21 08.02.48.652 PM.jpg

Here it is with the Axton unit on. Its a freaking spot light!
Overview 2021-02-21 08.03.49.570 PM.jpg

Look at the lawn and white truck in the distance with the Axton unit on. That's about 150' from the Axton unit. There is a shadow on the road from the lamp pole!
 
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That is freaking awesome! I ordered once the CMVision 300-400ft IR blaster and I couldn't see a difference at all. My old Sunba PTZ was a better blaster LOL.

I need to get one of these - it would so help my one camera and some overflow would hit my plate area and maybe get some of these tough plates like you get!
 
wittaj said:
That is freaking awesome! I ordered once the CMVision 300-400ft IR blaster and I couldn't see a difference at all. My old Sunba PTZ was a better blaster LOL.

I need to get one of these - it would so help my one camera and some overflow would hit my plate area and maybe get some of these tough plates like you get!
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I'm very happy with it. Its a bit pricey (~$300) but I figure for the amount of money and time I've put into my system its a drop in the bucket :)
 
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Welps, I guess my wallet is going to be a lot thinner down the road. I’ll put this on the bucket list to buy once spring rolls around. Have to time it with the fibre trench for (camera’s) Christmas tree.
 
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Going through the vehicles that passed by the house last night and found that this plate wasn't read by OpenALPR:

celluloid-shot0002.jpg

The overview shows it as this truck (I need to adjust the shutter a bit to reduce blur):
Overview 2021-02-21 10.56.23.136 PM.jpg

I brightened up the plate picture and cropped it some and came up with this:

celluloid-shot0002.jpg

It looks like "S795TF" which I don't have a record for at all in my plate DB system. Unfortunately our neighborhood has two exit/entrances so a vehicle doesn't have to pass by my house to get into the neighborhood anymore like they used to have to do. That could explain why I've never seen it before. The reason I wanted to post this is because I'm confident there is absolutely no way that using only the 5241 emitters would have captured this plate. This plate is so poor/dirty/damaged that the Axton barely even captured it.
 
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Auto Check has no entry for S795TF as a Florida plate.
 
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samplenhold said:
Auto Check has no entry for S795TF as a Florida plate.
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I always forget about that site. Maybe I'll see if I can brighten it a bit more and see if perhaps I have confused a "S" with a "5" or something similar.

Do you have to feed autocheck a state or can you just give it a plate number?
 
Yes, you need to give it a state. It also does not have trailer or paper tags in their database.

1614010788768.png
 
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Yeah that would work! Knowing how powerful these units are, I could have easily used that one out to ~115' that I'm shooting instead of the one I got.
 
Just a quick update, I've been running the Axton illuminator for about 3 weeks now. Every morning I meticulously go back through all the car motion alerts that drove past my house the previous night and match up what OpenALPR read vs the motion alert times. I'm still batting a thousand on cars going by and getting a legible/readable plate. I have not found one plate yet that I couldn't read at night. Sometimes OpenALPR will miss a plate, but when I play back the BI video, the plate is perfectly clear when I pause the frame so I just chalk that up as AI malfunctioning for some reason.

There isn't one car in three weeks that has gone past my house at night that I don't have a plate for. Now some plates are covered up by wheels or hitches which we can't do anything about, but the plates that can be seen are all easily readable. I have not found a paper plate at night yet so I still don't know if I can read those or not.

Really loving this thing.
 
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wittaj said:
Yep....I am guilty of oh I think I can improve this...and nope. If it works, don't mess with it LOL.

A month ago or so I thought - hey if I stretch this Z12 to 210 feet I could lessen my angle and be more straight on. Looked GREAT during the day. Nighttime got very few plates...

Then I had to re-adjust back to where it was pointing and these things can be a pain to fine tune point them at the zoom we run LOL.
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@wittaj So are you going to get a Laser bouncing off China cabinet mirror and give 210 feet a try again? :D
 
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biggen said:
So now the results. How does it perform? Well, it performs so well, that I had to step up the shutter speed to 1/2000 and even gain down to 0 - 40 because my first plates that were captured were washed out and waaaay too "hot". I was lucky in that I aimed it right when I installed it so I didn't have to do any tweaking or moving. Here is a plate I got last night (capture in OpenALPR) with the Axton unit, for example, that I've never seen before at night with the built-in 5241-Z12 emitters:
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I can wholeheartedly recommend the Axton AT-11E-S. In addition to adjusting the shutter and gain to avoid washout by my Axton illuminator because it's so bright, I can and have lowered the aperture of my camera. The smaller aperture keeps the target in focus for greater range of distance, so adjusting the focus is not as critical for good capture.

The price has gone up on B&H recently. It was $280 in April, 2021.
 
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