IPC-HDW2231R-ZS 2MP Starlight - Poor quality at night?

Jared K

Jared K

n3wb
Jul 31, 2019
11
0
New Hampshire
Hi, all. Newbie here, and to surveillance. Tech background; run an IT consulting company. Finally getting around to setting up cameras (with a QNAP NAS though not applicable here). Setup my IPC-HDW2231 purchased through EmpireTech. It's on night profile. I thought it would be a lot better at night. It's been a year since I researched and bought the camera but I remember buying it for night time performance.

After setting it up, the image quality at night is pretty poor I think. I don't have much to compare this to but I've watched videos of other starlight camera on here and they are amazing at night. Am I missing something in the settings?

When I turn a light on 2 lights out there it gets a little better.

Two images attached. One is with no lights, one is with the flood light on. Images captured directly from the camera web UI.
20200705_223919.png20200705_224416.png
 
The bright white car up close is causing the camera to reduce the exposure so it doesn't "blow out" the highlights. Several suggestions (that particular model may or may not have all of the options below):
  • In the camera's Picture settings, try raising Gamma to lighten the dark areas (note that this will also reduce contrast/shadows during the daytime unless you're using separate day/night profiles).
  • Try setting IR Light to Manual, 100%. This will force the camera to illuminate the farther areas fully regardless of the bright car (although it won't stop it from limiting the image exposure to compensate).
  • Try setting BLC Mode to BLC & Customized, dragging the spot metering rectangle to an area away from the white car. This will tell the camera to set the image exposure solely based on the contents of the spot metering rectangle. If you set it to a dark area, the picture will be overexposed.
  • The camera might have an Exposure Value or Exposure Bias setting somewhere (some Dahua cameras have this setting). Try raising it to suggest that the camera raise its auto-exposure.
For example, I got the following detail from your second image by simply raising the gamma:
better-gamma.jpg
 
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shalem2014 said:
The bright white car up close is causing the camera to reduce the exposure so it doesn't "blow out" the highlights. Several suggestions (that particular model may or may not have all of the options below):
  • In the camera's Picture settings, try raising Gamma to lighten the dark areas.
  • Try setting IR Light to Manual, 100%.
  • Try setting BLC Mode to BLC & Customized, dragging the spot metering rectangle to an area away from the white car.
Click to expand...
Awesome. I will try these. I took a video and I guess it's a little better than thought. We normally don't have the cars there. Will try again tomorrow without cars.

Here is a video. Just uploaded to youtube so may take a minute. Can barely see me just behind the car.

 
Jared K said:
Here is what it looks like during the day.
Click to expand...
Looks pretty good—except the camera has a minor focus issue. The bottom left side is nice and clear while the right and top right sides are a bit distorted. Again, the image will be brighter when the white car is moved.
 
Another test option. Temporarily swap the car sides and see what happens.
 
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