Best way to configure this camera

[mackmadera]

First, It's a Anpviz 4 MP turret camera I got for a discount off Amazon. Spent $29.5 total on each, bought two. So they were cheap enough. In the day, video is quite good for my purpose, which is just basic home security. The thing that concerns me is night, where it's not the greatest quality. Wondering if I could tweak the firmware settings to improve night recordings. Please feel free to give me any suggestions! Thanks to all who reply.. I'm recording to two HKVision DVRs with 12TB hard drives, and I have Blue Iris on two computers as well, though I'm just starting to get Blue Iris set up. Pretty well ready to accept that these camera's are sow's ears, not silk purses . But rather than mess with a return I thought I'd try to keep them.

 

[wittaj]

The problem with many of the cheap cameras are that their firmware is designed to give a nice bright static image at night. That comes at the cost of poor performance with an object in motion.

And the user can do nothing to correct this even with settings because it has been shown that Reolink (and most consumer grade cameras) favor nice bright static images at night over performance.

So at some point even if you can set shutter settings and other settings as I mentioned in your other thread, the camera will override your input in favor of a nice bright image. This is done by slowing down the shutter and increasing the gain. So then you see what Reolinks are notorious for - ghost blur invisible person images at night and inability to capture plates.

So the difference between a better camera like say a Dahua and some no-name camera on Amazon is that you can set parameters on the Dahua and it will hold. If you set parameters on these other cameras that would result in a darker image the algorithm internally says "idiot alert" and it won't let you set parameters that the firmware thinks will result in not displaying a nice bright image. Don't believe me, set the shutter to 1/10,000 at night and the image should be completely black. It won't with any cheap camera. It will override your 1/10,000 shutter and favor a bright image. It is a good test to determine how good the camera is.

But most consumer grade camera manufacturers know that consumers chase MP, so to keep costs down, they will put 1/3" or 1/2.8" sensors in the cameras. And 8MP on a 1/3" sensor looks great on default settings for a static image at night....and that is what the consumer looks at. No consumer then tests it with motion.

 

[mackmadera]

I did set the shutter speed high and it did turn the camera black. I'm going to play with this tonight also at a lower MP setting. My expectations are low. Daytime pics are awesome for 4 MP. Night is a whole nother animal.

 

[wittaj]

It is best to keep the camera on its native resolution because lowering the MP doesn't change the "pixel screen". So the camera is first processing at the native resolution and then processes it to a lower resolution, which may be ok or poor.

But play with it with the same comparable settings I put in the other thread and that will get you as good as the camera can get.

 

[mackmadera]

This is what I've got so far. I'm using an IR illuminator. The farthest away she gets from the camera is about 25 feet. On the same pole, I've got a reolink 510-A and a cheap IP tracking cam. I've got to tone down the illumination a bit. Will be interesting to see where the cheap Dahua fits on this. The illuminator was $30.
View attachment .mp4

 

[wittaj]

External IR can help a lot. That wasn't terrible. Could try increasing shutter and dropping gain to knock out some of the IR washout.

 

[mackmadera]

There's no doubt the firmware saves the settings and is the real deal. It's just that the camera has limitations. I did turn the shutter up and lowered the IR to 50%, which definitely helped. I'll have a chance to tweak it in the next few days. Not too bad for a $60 combo between the IR light and the camera. I am going to pick up a few IR lights of varying power and see if less is more or if half the light from two different directions works better.

 

[mackmadera]

With zero documentation, I find myself guessing at what some of these parameters are. You can't get any usable video off this if you go any faster than 109 on the shutter speed. Any higher, and it's useless. This is a great place to learn with a lot of very knowledgeable folks. I do see three of those Dahua 2MP cameras in my future. I love that shutter speed on a camera that's made for it.