To help others evaluate the capabilities of the 2CD2332 (4mm lens) HIK camera, I attach three pics of the same scene.
1st pic night picture with a LED light bulb of 12W (960lumens) lighting the hall entrance.
2nd pic night picture with the camera set at night mode only (i.e. forcing the infrared view)
3rd picture daylight picture with no additional lighting at all.
With the current LED light bulb the camera never switches into infrared mode and the night images are very well lit and accurately captured. This proves the importance of the light used and the surrounding surfaces which in my case have proven very usefull.
The camera is set at 3Mpixels resolution capturing at 8Mbps, with video quality at Highest, at 20fps, exposure=1/50, Gain=100, WDR=ON at level 20, Digital Noise reduction ON at level 10.
The actual video quality is much higher than the attached pics because when HIK NVR captures the images it stores them with very high compression. The snapshot capturing with an application like VLC or mediaplayer from the actual video is of much higher quality.