It is best to have a mixture if you don't have the available light - B/W infrared to capture good clean captures and some color overview to fill in skin and clothing and car colors.
While color is obviously preferred, sometimes we have field of views that just do not have enough light and need to be in B/W with infrared.
Like many here, I use both to help ensure maximum opportunities to capture a clean image.
While infrared is great, because it is in B/W, sometimes you can get cleaner captures for like a face or something, but color determination is way off, and some colors are problematic with infrared.
So I notice this non-descript plain white truck go by so I got suspicious:
So I pull up a color camera to see what is going on and this is the truck:
Now that you know it is a Kroger truck, you can kinda see it in the B/W photo, but wow!
Now imagine if this were someone that had damage done to say a parked car hit by this vehicle and all they had were B/W cameras going, nobody would suspect this truck!
If at all possible, one should try to run some overview cameras in color - even though they clearly are not for IDENTIFY purposes, they help paint a better picture as to color and some other details that may be lost with infrared and B/W.
This perp was good so I didn't get a super clean image, but good enough for the police to recognize and ID him.
Meanwhile, this was the best image any of my neighbors could get:
But this also shows the importance of having at least one camera in color even if it produces a blurry image.
Based on the description from the B/W, they probably would have let this person in the color image go as the pants are black and the top is all black too. It must have some black material on it that made it really reflective with IR.
Most would not say this is the same person. Plus the B/W image doesn't even give much detail to the face.
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