Hello everyone!
I have registered here to benefit from your compiled experience.
My minimum goal is to recognize a moving person at night at 10 ft. or less. If the person is unknown, the ability to identify would be great. There are several light sources present, street lights, motion activated lights and permanent lights. One might barely be able to read a page at the level of illumination.
I have played around with consumer systems like blink or rechargable reolinks and realized that I need a better system and control over the shutter speed to have a chance. Blinks are just toys, and the reolink cam can't do the job at night. The Argus 3 Pro has no shutter control, so moving objects are blurry (as is common knowledge here). But I must give it credit that it's detection itself has created no false positives and no known false negatives so far. In other words, I never got a "person alert" that didn't have a person and when we passed it, it always send a person alert. It has registered a ton of motion alerts without persons and classified them correctly. So while I can't use it to recognize someone reliably at night, I may turn the siren and lights alarm function on. (I just mention all this because other members commented they like to know where one stands.)
I also experimented with a cheap Reolink Lumus which offers 24/7 to SDcard and can turn off all active (IR/visible) lights. I can use it through a window. I can also lower the shutter speed manually on this one so blur turns into a person with some "holes". I can recognize myself on that now. Perhaps there is some other change to improve the result, like adding bandwith?
My immediate objective now is
to pick one suitable starlight camera, to find out myself what to expect from a real low light system. And this is why I post here. In the long run, I expect to set up a system outside via POE. From reading here, I will likely be fine with 2 or 4 Mp resolution. So I need a capable sensor for low light. I have to settle for a focal lenght too. The person will likely not be further than 8-9 ft away from the camera when it enters the fov. I have seen many cameras with focal points beyond that distance. With fixed focal ranges, it seems that I am limited to 2.8mm? How blurry do 4mm cams get when people get closer? Should I get a varifocal, even thou that will cost me f-stop? Would that have auto focus? Or can I set a distance range? And how fast would auto focus respond?
The camera needs to be able to record continuously on some SD. I would also like to use the opportunity to take a look at the smartphone app, to see how that works. I'd also like to monitor it from a computer. In the long run, a dedicated recorder is planned do the job.
Aside from testing it in varous parts of the house, I would use it for stop gap monitoring through a window. Which means, I must be able to turn off all camera lights. The camera should have an intelligent detection so that it flags the recording with the various detects. If it can send push messages to the phone, that would be nice too.
As I reside in Europe, I checked local offers. From Hikvision I found a
DS-2CD2047G2-LU/SL and an DS-2CD2047G2-L(U) as something that seems suitable from the sensor size, f-stop, focal length and intelligence. I'd probably rather have this with IR, but was not able to find it in all their products.
So if you could help me to find my first low-light camera for a start, I would much appreciate it!
Many thanks in advance!
You can also wire up an 
