Generic Chicom 20x IP PTZ Night Settings

[OICU2]

I have this generic chicom 20x PTZ that works great for what I need it to do. However I am trying to dial in a more clear night vision picture and the settings on these are alot to be desired. In BI it identifies as a 'CantonK'. Wondering if anyone has any experience with tuning this type or similar? Here is a screen grab of the camera settings:

 

[wittaj]

The biggest issue with the generic and other consumer grade type cameras are that they won't adhere to manual settings as they tend to make these cameras to favor a bright image.

The difference between say a Dahua or Hikvision and a generic camera (and most consumer grade cameras like Reolink and others) is that you can set parameters on the Dahua or Hikvision and it will hold. If you set parameters on the generic camera and the algorithm internally says "idiot alert" 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 is a good test to determine how good the camera is.

So based on your above settings, try taking the exposure off of automatic and make it manual or whatever it says.

But I can tell you that with a shutter speed of 0.1 to 6ms that it is showing, if it adheres to that, the image is probably dark at night unless you have a ton of light. If the image is still bright then there isn't much you can do to improve the image as the algorithm is favoring a bright image over good motion captures at night.

Or do the test and make it 0.1 to 0.1ms. That image at night should be black. If it isn't then not much you can do to improve the image with motion.

 

[OICU2]

Thanks, the image does get dark at night as expected with that shutter speed. I am not really worried about motion blur this is just an super overview camera but I would like a little more clear night vision, it is low light area and the IR lights it up pretty good but it's a little grainy.

 

[wittaj]

Oh in that case then, make the 6ms faster - you can probably go to 16.67ms and still not be too blurry, but will add more light and probably less grain.

 

[OICU2]

I'll give that a shot, what about all that other crap, AE reference, AE sensitivity, Dnc threshold, DWDR, defogg, etc?

 

[wittaj]

I'd keep those for there now and let's see what happens to the image tonight. Those seem to be ok as a start, especially for overview.