I Ordered an Axis Communications Axis Q1808-LE Camera

So that worked! Congrats
Yes, and a big Thank You for your help in the matter. I have one more Dahua camara on the NVR and I may very well put it on the LAN as well. All of a sudden I cannot access the configuration of the camera through the NVR. I can still get to some of it by other means such as the zoom through the PTZ controls.
 
Once you get things settled, need to get one of the network gurus to help you set that part of your LAN on a separate segment, so your cameras are isolated. VLAN

I use my firewall appliance to do it but I’m not experienced enough to tell you how otherwise.
 
A couple of thoughts. I have the camera plugged in on the LAN and the computer uses Edge when I type in the address looking for the camera. Only the 4 NVR addresses are on Internet Explorer. Interesting thing when I hooked the camera up to the LAN this morning and assigned the address to the NVR #3 port, it saw it right away. It is also storing the video.

Edit: I am about 3/4 of being fully zoomed in.

The image you posted before looks like its 16:9. The 10MP setting is 4:3. Under video- Capture mode- is it set to 4K or 10MP 4:3?

How are your results so far at night?
 
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I’m not a huge fan of the WDR on this camera at night. How does the image look while people/vehicles are moving. What are your current settings?

Not bad on the moving objects, but I have the shutter speed set at 1/50. I would like to up that, but the picture gets darker. I have the sharpness up to 90 which is way different from a Dahua or a Hikvision. With those I would have them set around 40. With this camera the higher the sharpness setting the better the picture. I will leave the WDR off. Some things are just different with this camera from what I am used to.
 
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Not bad on the moving objects, but I have the shutter speed set at 1/50. I would like to up that, but the picture gets darker. I have the sharpness up to 90 which is way different from a Dahua or a Hikvision. With those I would have them set around 40. With this camera the higher the sharpness setting the better the picture. I will leave the WDR off. Some things are just different with this camera from what I am used to.
Yeah, the settings on this camera are different, even when compared to other Axis cameras. I have my exposure set to 1/30 but the motion blur slider all the way to less blur. That seems to work for my field of view. What is your motion blur slider set to?
 
If You want to have full picture at night + see plates (reflections) WDR is the only way to go...
Yes - it looks different, it has bad colors, everything is digitally sharpened but it's best tool to have forensic footage at any light conditions.
 
If You want to have full picture at night + see plates (reflections) WDR is the only way to go...
Yes - it looks different, it has bad colors, everything is digitally sharpened but it's best tool to have forensic footage at any light conditions.

I have other cameras to pick up license plates. This camera is mainly to get better images of people across the street at night. So far it is better than what I have. The question, is it worth 2K to the average person?
 
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Yeah, the settings on this camera are different, even when compared to other Axis cameras. I have my exposure set to 1/30 but the motion blur slider all the way to less blur. That seems to work for my field of view. What is your motion blur slider set to?

I will look into that later on today. You have been very helpful. Thank You.
 
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I have other cameras to pick up license plates. This camera is mainly to get better images of people across the street at night. So far it is better than what I have. The question, is it worth 2K to the average person?

You didn't showed any footage how moving people/cars are looking at night..
How many details are visible (faces, car plates etc)..
This is final exam for any camera - is good or not.

About 2K price question - no it's not worth 2K to the average person.

Especially that at this price, You have 5216-EI NVR + 6 * 5442-ZE (or Color4K-T) + 2 * 5442-Z4E (or 5241-Z12E) combo in Andy shop, with which You can do complete house CCTV system with 6 overview cams around house and 2 zoomed at street ones..
Yes, it will have a little worse night performance. But it will cover all house and street needs for 95% folks..

But it can be worth for You.. As You told, you want to see better images of people across the street at night... :)
 
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Yeah, the settings on this camera are different, even when compared to other Axis cameras. I have my exposure set to 1/30 but the motion blur slider all the way to less blur. That seems to work for my field of view. What is your motion blur slider set to?

Mine is in the middle. I will play with my motion blur tonight and see what is best.
 
You didn't showed any footage how moving people/cars are looking at night..
How many details are visible (faces, car plates etc)..
This is final exam for any camera - is good or not.

About 2K price question - no it's not worth 2K to the average person.

Especially that at this price, You have 5216-EI NVR + 6 * 5442-ZE (or Color4K-T) + 2 * 5442-Z4E (or 5241-Z12E) combo in Andy shop, with which You can do complete house CCTV system with 6 overview cams around house and 2 zoomed at street ones..
Yes, it will have a little worse night performance. But it will cover all house and street needs for 95% folks..

But it can be worth for You.. As You told, you want to see better images of people across the street at night... :)

Well, I was going to post some video from last night, but it did not record any. I must have made a change that affected it. It was working earlier in the day.
 
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I have other cameras to pick up license plates. This camera is mainly to get better images of people across the street at night. So far it is better than what I have. The question, is it worth 2K to the average person?

No, it's not worth it for the average person for residential use. The price of these cameras aren't just for the image quality. These cameras come with 10 years of firmware updates to stay up to date with features and cybersecurity. They meet NDAA, TAA, FIPS 140-2 or 3 compliance, support zero trust networking and have support for signed video (adds cryptographic signatures to recorded video to verify the video is authentic and hasn't been tampered with). They also have additional cybersecurity features such as Edge Vault etc. They support integration to access control systems, perimeter detection systems that include radar units, thermal imaging sensors, speakers, sirens/strobes and relay units. They support MQTT, VAPIX commands, ACAP (Axis Camera Application Platform) where apps can be developed and run directly on the camera itself. The higher end ones also have DLPU (Deep Learning Processing Units) for analytics. The Zipstream technology and compression allow these cameras to use less bitrate while maintaining image quality. My Axis cameras use about half of the storage/bitrate when compared to my Dahua cameras without sacrificing image quality.

In order to take full advantage of this camera you would need to use ACS Pro, Milestone XProtect or Genetech VMS systems. The Q1808 has a ton of analytics and you're not really able to take advantage of it using a Hikvision NVR.

In my opinion, the best bang for your buck when it comes to Axis cameras are either the P1468-LE or the P3265-LVE (depending on the intended purpose). The P3265-LVE is a 2mp dome but you'd be surprised how good the image processing is and how well its able to capture faces.

For a long distance fixed camera, I'd have to say most likely the Q1806-LE but I haven't been able to test it yet.
 
OK, I fixed the download problem and here is a video from last night of people walking and a car going by. Also, a man standing in the porch. I checked Codec and it is 4K at 30FPS. So tonight, I will do some more tweaking as suggested by the above posts.


I would recommend resetting to factory defaults and starting from there. You can reset all the values to default without losing the IP settings by going to maintenance and using the "restore" option. I run mine in IR mode at night because I don't have enough light in the field of view for color. I use the following settings and I suggest you give them a try. Exposure Mode- Automatic, Max shutter 1/30, max gain 51, Blur-noise trade-off- all the way to low motion blur. Saturation, Contrast, Brightness, Sharpness at default of 50 (Some of my Axis cameras I run Saturation and Contrast at 60 for a better image). WDR- Off (WDR negatively impacts the night image on this camera where it doesn't with my other Axis cameras). The tradeoff to disabling the WDR at night are those street lights might washout faces.

The area directly in front of your house looks a little darker than the rest, you may need to enable the white LED's at night to add a little more light to the scene. You can turn on the white lights by creating an AOA (Axis Object Analytics) scenario and set parameters when to trigger the scenario (person walking in x area etc.). You then go to Events and add a rule to activate the lights when that scenario is triggered. You can also activate them based on a schedule.

Also something to take into consideration, this camera has an aperture of F1.7 zoomed out with a wide field of view and an aperture of F4.0 when fully zoomed in. I'd say you're probably closer to the F4.0 so you're going to need a little extra light in the scene.
 
it's like adding another user than admin if I'm not too forgetful. As I recall on some dahua's there is an ONVIF user/pass and an Admin user/pass.
HIK might have similar.
 
Is the cam placement designed to get people walking or plates? As far as I can tell, the placement is bad for both. It’s at a 90 degree angle to the road so plates will be impossible. It’s also not zoomed in close enough to capture faces…
 
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