I Ordered an Axis Communications Axis Q1808-LE Camera

[smiticans]

Well, I have adjusted one of my security lights to hopefully light up that area a little bit more. Yes, you can adjust the gain. I have not seen the others listed as that. Axis may call it something else. I will look into it.

Go to image- exposure- and adjust the max gain to 63 (I'm pretty sure that's the default). That will brighten up the image a little but you will need to adjust additional settings. You can adjust the Blur-Noise tradeoff slider to less noise in small increments to see if that reduces the noise in the image but that may cause more motion blur.

If your sharpness is set to 100 that's too high and can introduce noise. What was the reason for changing the sharpness from the default settings?

I recommend using either the "forensic" or "Vivid" scene profiles at the default state until you fine tune the camera. I think you're adjusting too many settings at once without verifying if the adjustments are hurting or helping the image quality.

Go to video- image and select Overlays. Add a text overlay and type in "#B" without the quotation marks. This will display the current bitrate on the camera live feed. I recommend doing this while you're fine tuning the camera.

What are your current bitrate settings? Go to Video- Stream and click on General for compression, Zipstream for the Zipstream setting and bitrate control for the bitrate setting.

You can increase the bitrate by decreasing the compression (default is 30). Just keep in mind, if you use variable bitrate and turn off compression, be prepared for bitrate over 50Mb/s during the day. If you decide to disable compression, I would recommend switching to average bitrate and setting a target bitrate and a max bitrate.

Unfortunately for both you and I we're using this camera for a purpose it was not designed to do. Since the camera is mostly zoomed in, the aperture is pretty small (F=4.0 as opposed to F=1.7 zoomed out) which means we need more light to run it in color at night. The Dahua Color 4K-T has an aperture of F1.0 for reference.

I have a lot less light than you do and I'm able to get a better color image of a moving person at night than you. I think you can definitely improve the image quality but I personally don't think this is the right camera for your intended purpose. This camera is really designed for an overview of a large well lit area.

Also, what is the distance from where the camera is mounted to the sidewalk where the people were walking in the video?

I'm going to attempt to fine tune mine to run in color at night instead of IR. If I can find settings that I like, I'll post them for you to try.

 

[Parley]

My gain is currently set at 66. I have frame rate set at 30 and compression set at 30. Zipstream was set at low. I just changed it to medium. I have the max bitrate set at 10,000. Dynamic FPS is off, and Dynamic GOP is also off. I have the Blur-noise trade-off slider all the way to low motion blur. Thank You for your help. I think we are slowly getting there.

Edit: The white light came on as programed. A lady just walked by and things are better. However, it is not fully dark, but almost.

Edit 2: I went to 1/120 on the shutter speed and the scene did not seem to change light/dark wise.

 

[smiticans]

My gain is currently set at 66. I have frame rate set at 30 and compression set at 30. Zipstream was set at low. I just changed it to medium. I have the max bitrate set at 10,000. Dynamic FPS is off, and Dynamic GOP is also off. I have the Blur-noise trade-off slider all the way to low motion blur. Thank You for your help. I think we are slowly getting there.

Edit: The white light came on as programed. A lady just walked by and things are better. However, it is not fully dark, but almost.

Edit 2: I went to 1/120 on the shutter speed and the scene did not seem to change light/dark wise.

FYI changing the Zipstream to medium will decrease the bitrate and decrease the image quality.

Are you using Maximum bitrate for your bitrate control? That max bitrate is too low. With those settings I recommend using variable bitrate.

 

[Parley]

I changed the Zipstream back to Low and changed to Maximum bitrate. I now have 16000 for the bitrate. The image is the best it has been. Doing a slight adjustment to my security light has helped with the lighting a tad. Here is a still picture.

 

[smiticans]

I changed the Zipstream back to Low and changed to Maximum bitrate. I now have 16000 for the bitrate. The image is the best it has been. Doing a slight adjustment to my security light has helped with the lighting a tad. Here is a still picture.

View attachment 205466

If you didn’t already know, maximum bitrate is not like constant bitrate (CBR) in Dahua cameras. Maximum bitrate will just prevent the camera from exceeding the maximum bitrate you set. The bitrate itself will still be variable.

Variable bitrate provides the best image quality. With compression of 30 and zipstream of low the bitrate will stay within a reasonable limit (it’ll still use less bitrate/storage than a Dahua 4K camera but the bitrate will spike during busy scenes).

I recommend adding the bitrate overlay so you can see what’s happening real time.

I think 1/120 exposure might be too fast but let’s see what happens when someone walks by.

 

[Parley]

I will change it to variable bitrate. So far so good on 1/120 shutter. Thank you again for all of your help. I think we are winning this battle.

Edit: I lowered the shutter speed to 1/60. Now the picture is a little brighter. A person walking up the street looked good, but he was far away. People crossing in front of the camera is where the battle is. This will probably take another night or two.

 

[smiticans]

I will change it to variable bitrate. So far so good on 1/120 shutter. Thank you again for all of your help. I think we are winning this battle.

Edit: I lowered the shutter speed to 1/60. Now the picture is a little brighter. A person walking up the street looked good, but he was far away. People crossing in front of the camera is where the battle is. This will probably take another night or two.

Without knowing the rest of the settings on your camera and distance, I think the key here is going to be adding more white light or running it in IR.

How does the image look if you zoom out all the way or only zoom it in about 10%?

 

[JDreaming]

Thank you for always sharing the images and videos of these new cameras reviews with us. It's nice to see and learn about the more high-end Axis cameras and comparing the image quality with the Dahua and hikvision cameras that we usually have here.

Really appreciate you and tech101 always leading the way with these big ticket cameras and providing nice eye candy for us. As for the question of is it worth 2k to the average person, the Axis Q1808-LE image quality is good but not $2K good to me. The max I'm willing to spend for that image quality is $500-$600 range. If I'm spending 2K on a camera I might as well buy the Dahua PTZ4K45X-AI.

 

[EMPIRETECANDY]

Thanks for trying @Parley , The 4K Pic not too fancy based on that price.
Axis is too professional for end users.

 

[steve1225]

I will change it to variable bitrate. So far so good on 1/120 shutter. Thank you again for all of your help. I think we are winning this battle.

Edit: I lowered the shutter speed to 1/60. Now the picture is a little brighter. A person walking up the street looked good, but he was far away. People crossing in front of the camera is where the battle is. This will probably take another night or two.

You should stay at 1/60.. it looks like this is max for this camera to have nice color image...

In different thread You wrote that You have 2 SD8A820WA-HNF with 4/3" sensor...

Can You put some video footage (or pictures) of walking people from SD8A820WA-HNF (if possible from the same street / area) for comparison?

 

[Parley]

You should stay at 1/60.. it looks like this is max for this camera to have nice color image...

In different thread You wrote that You have 2 SD8A820WA-HNF with 4/3" sensor...

Can You put some video footage (or pictures) of walking people from SD8A820WA-HNF (if possible from the same street / area) for comparison?

I will post up a video from the Dahua PTZ later today. Yes, I am still at 1/60 shutter rate.

 

[Parley]

Thanks for trying @Parley , The 4K Pic not too fancy based on that price.
Axis is too professional for end users.

I have to agree. For one thing I would like to have a day/night schedule for some of the items. One being the shutter rate and some of the other settings. As of this morning the white light did not shut off. It went on OK last night as scheduled. Maybe I have to write a rule to shut it off?

 

[Parley]

Ok, here is a video from the Dahau DH-SD8A820WA-HNF PTZ from last night. The shutter speed is set at 1/120 for the night time. Now this is supposedly an older 4/3" chipset and Dahua has discontinued this camera after they could no longer get this chip set. I was thinking that the Axia camera had a more up to date version of the 4/3" chip set. This has people walking by and a truck driving through. The stop sign area is not in focus. The main focus of this PTZ camera starts at the center of the intersection.

 

[steve1225]

Ok, here is a video from the Dahau DH-SD8A820WA-HNF PTZ from last night. The shutter speed is set at 1/120 for the night time. Now this is supposedly an older 4/3" chipset and Dahua has discontinued this camera after they could no longer get this chip set. I was thinking that the Axia camera had a more up to date version of the 4/3" chip set. This has people walking by and a truck driving through. The stop sign area is not in focus. The main focus of this PTZ camera starts at the center of the intersection.

if this is 1/120 (two times shorter shutter time that axis), then this beats up Axis...

the biggest problem here are ghost after moving targets..
You should try to reduce 3d NR.. or even reduce gain + 3d NR..
find most acceptable levels...

Sony have only one old Starvis 4/3" sensor.
10Mpx IMX294CJK in 4:3 ratio..
Interesting is that Dahua use only 8Mpx in 16:9 ratio..

Both cameras have aperture starting at F1.6.
Axis is very fast closing to F4.0 at 4x zoom.
Dahua is slowly closing to F5.0 but at 20x zoom

You use here something like 3x zoom in Axis and 2x in Dahua - so Dahua have much more open aperture at this zoom level.
There are big differences in ISP (image signal processor).

ps. both cams have (had) similar price.. Dahua SD8 has much more features (it's PTZ!) and better night image.

 

[Parley]

Short supply of people walking by last night. However here is a video of a couple walking by. I will look into reducing the gain and the 3D NR on the PTZ camera.

 

[bigredfish]

Is that with the Axis white lights on?

Something I’ve noticed and struggled with that many don’t see is trying to get crisp clear faces/humans in motion at night in low light, IR or Color, is 9x harder the closer/tighter the shot.

The further you zoom in the harder it is to freeze motion and get rid of fuzzies* (noise, pixelization) I’m talking about a human taking up the majority of the image

I’ll post examples

 

[Parley]

Is that with the Axis white lights on?

Something I’ve noticed and struggled with that many don’t see is trying to get crisp clear faces/humans in motion at night in low light, IR or Color, is 9x harder the closer/tighter the shot.

The further you zoom in the harder it is to freeze motion and get rid of fuzzies* (noise, pixelization) I’m talking about a human taking up the majority of the image

I’ll post examples

Yes, the white light is on. If the people are walking towards the camera, it is easier to get crisper faces. If they are walking across the camera it seems to make it harder. What I might do is increase the wattage on my security light. It is currently a PAR38 LED putting out 90 watts equivalent. I can install a 120 watt version and see what happens.

 

[smiticans]

I have to agree. For one thing I would like to have a day/night schedule for some of the items. One being the shutter rate and some of the other settings. As of this morning the white light did not shut off. It went on OK last night as scheduled. Maybe I have to write a rule to shut it off?

If you can, post a picture of the settings for the schedule you created and the settings for the rule created to turn on the white light

 

[smiticans]

Thank you for always sharing the images and videos of these new cameras reviews with us. It's nice to see and learn about the more high-end Axis cameras and comparing the image quality with the Dahua and hikvision cameras that we usually have here.

Really appreciate you and tech101 always leading the way with these big ticket cameras and providing nice eye candy for us. As for the question of is it worth 2k to the average person, the Axis Q1808-LE image quality is good but not $2K good to me. The max I'm willing to spend for that image quality is $500-$600 range. If I'm spending 2K on a camera I might as well buy the Dahua PTZ4K45X-AI.

In my opinion, the Q1808-LE is not a good representation of Axis cameras in both image quality and image processing. I'm hopeful that a software update will improve its performance. One of the main advantages to Axis cameras in regards to image quality is the really good image processing of scenes that have bright and dark spots. Example would be a store front where the camera is pointed to a full glass entrance and the sun is shinning brightly outside. The Axis cameras can process the scene and provide a clear balanced view inside the building and outside while still being able to provide an ID on a face. Another example would be a spot light shining on a person at night. The Axis cameras will process the image and provide a good face ID even with the light shinning on them. I would have to do a ton of fine tuning with my Dahua cameras to eliminate the overexposure and still not get as good of results. A lot of the other features and cybersecurity compliance doesn't really have an advantage for your average homeowner.

I uploaded videos to YouTube of two of my Axis Cameras.

Driveway camera is a P1468-LE running at default settings except using the Vivid profile and the exposure was set to 1/120. The Driveway camera has a 60 watt LED spotlight for illumination and the camera is zoomed in about 15%

Front Door camera is a Q3538-LVE dome running at default settings except using the Vivid profile and the exposure was set to 1/100. The illumination for this camera is only the white LED's on a Dahua 4K-T mounted to the top left of the camera and two 15 watt CFL's ceiling mounted out of the field of view. I have a 100watt LED light for the front porch but that was turned off because it was attracting too many bugs.

You can see the bitrate of each camera by the bitrate overlay on the bottom right of the video.

Night time video of P1468-LE with delivery driver jogging through the scene


Night time video of P1468-LE with license plate and high beams shining into the camera.


Night time video of Q3538-LVE


Daytime video of Q3538-LVE


The quality of the front door camera is better when I have the 100w led bulb on. If there's interest I can post a video of that when I get one available. I haven't really spent much time trying to fine tune these cameras so they're pretty much at the default. The purpose of the driveway camera is to ID someone who goes by the vehicles. It is not intended to view the street or another area. The purpose of the front door camera is only to ID someone who comes to the front door, I'm not tryin to use it as an overview.

 

[Parley]

^^^^ Thank you for taking the time to post those videos. I noticed in the first two videos, when he starts to move "across" the screen his face is doing what I am seeing in my video. I may be about as close as I can be with this camera.