Looking for some help to get the most out of my Darkfighter Camera

[woodsie]

I recently installed a DS-2CD4526FWD-IZH Low Light camera to help with a very challenging light situation. The area I'm looking at is basically pitch black at night with none of the kind of ambient light you would normally get in a neighborhood or city.

Attached is an image of what I'm working with right now. If you blow it up to full screen, you can see that it is very noisy and nothing along the lines of fine detail is available. I would have figured this is typical of our average 2-line $100 bullet or dome camera but I'm a bit surprised that a low light camera is struggling this much with this scene. It's certainly not as good of results as I've seen from other people with Hikvision Darkfighter cameras.

I previously had a DS-2CD2132F-IS in this location and it was basically worthless at night. You pretty much couldn't see a thing so on that note I know I am getting SOME improvement out of the box.

What are some settings I should be tweaking to get the most out of this camera?

-Exposure is set to 1/30 which is oddly the lowest it can go in the firmware.
-Gain is set to 60 but cranking that up towards 100 just makes the picture foggy looking
-Auto-Iris Level is set to 50. I'm simply not familiar with this setting and what it accomplishes. Nothing really happens when I move this setting around at night.

Any ideas? I'm open to suggestions both on the cameras settings or in the physical world. I can obviously improve my situation by leaving exterior lights on but I'd like to see what I can get out of this camera first.

 

[fenderman]

That looks very bad...does it improve significantly when some lights are turned on?

 

[woodsie]

It does improve but I still think it underwhelms compared to what I've seen these Darkfighter cams do on other people's reviews and YouTube videos.

My theories at the moment are:

1) I don't have the settings tweaked quite right. For example, maybe the lens isn't letting enough light in at night. The picture looks fine during the day if not over saturated.

2) The eaves of the house are in the picture and brightly lit by the infrared. Maybe this is causing the auto iris to close up (pardon my ignorance if that understanding is incorrect) and not let in enough light for the rest of the scene.

3) It's just a challenging scene in general since the majority of the picture is an asphalt driveway that is absorbing the majority of light. I ran this camera in my basement at night in pitch black just to see what it could do before I installed it and it was like daytime in the dark. Very clear picture, looked considerably better than my cheaper cameras. Not even a spec of noise.

Attached is a screen shot when the exterior flood lights are turned on. Never mind the monster looking thing in the background. That's a doggy.

 

[fenderman]

Much better, but still not great. I would look at #2 first.
Regardless, lights on are always best..have you tried running in day mode with lights on? How does it look?

 

[woodsie]

I have not tried that but I think I JUST figured it out. Hopefully this will help someone else out reading this thread having the same problem in the future.

I turned off WDR on the camera and BAM the noise went away and the picture cleaned up dramatically. I'm guessing that's pretty much the key. WDR didn't do anything important for me during the day so I'll just turn it off and leave it off.

It may be difficult to appreciate the difference in a screen capture but in full motion it's dramatic.

Here we go. First image with light from the garage and second in pitch black. MUCH better.

 

[fenderman]

Wow, the difference is incredible...wdr adds lots of noise but Ive never seen it that bad...was it set to 100? Generally if its set to around 10 its fine...
Have you tested it in day mode with some light? Curious how it would look...I would leave the outdoor lights on regardless, the image will be better. Use LED bulbs and a timer like this that works off your coordinates to calculate sunrise sunset http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Econoswitch-RPLS740B-Programmable-Switch/dp/B004AP92N2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437619213&sr=8-1&keywords=honeywell+timer

 

[Mel42]

"-Exposure is set to 1/30 which is oddly the lowest it can go in the firmware."

The spec for this cam shows "1 s to 1/100,000 s" I would think a higher end cam like this that is "Ultra Low Light" would be capable of going lower than 1/30.
On my 4024 box cams 1/12 gives a much better night image without motion blur, might want to check some other settings that may enable it to go lower and you should get an ever better night image.

 

[woodsie]

"-Exposure is set to 1/30 which is oddly the lowest it can go in the firmware."

The spec for this cam shows "1 s to 1/100,000 s" I would think a higher end cam like this that is "Ultra Low Light" would be capable of going lower than 1/30.
On my 4024 box cams 1/12 gives a much better night image without motion blur, might want to check some other settings that may enable it to go lower and you should get an ever better night image.

I did eventually find the answer to this question as well. 1/30 is the lowest with WDR enabled. If you turn off WDR, then you can go as low as 1s.

 

[MrFixit]

This was some great info. I have 6 cameras and only one of them had a lot of noise at night and I could not understand that because all my cameras are the same model and all the setting where the same. The only camera I had trouble with was the one on the driveway so I was leaning towards a bad camera till I came across this post, I have now disabled WDR and set the exposure to 1/12 and will see what happens tonight.

Thanks for sharing.

 

[woodsie]

This was some great info. I have 6 cameras and only one of them had a lot of noise at night and I could not understand that because all my cameras are the same model and all the setting where the same. The only camera I had trouble with was the one on the driveway so I was leaning towards a bad camera till I came across this post, I have now disabled WDR and set the exposure to 1/12 and will see what happens tonight.

Thanks for sharing.

Out of curiosity, what model cameras?

Once again, I'm short on specific knowledge but my understanding is that there is a difference in how WDR is achieved in "True WDR" cameras and other cameras. The Darkfighter camera I was using is a "True WDR" camera so disabling the WDR in my camera may give a different result than in a camera like the DS-2CD2032-I or DS-2CD2132-I.

Just doing a bit of reading, I think the "True WDR" cameras have sensors which can rapidly take multiple images at different exposure levels and then composite them on the fly to provide you with an optimized image.

By comparison, Hikvision Cameras without the "WD" designation in the part number accomplish their WDR mode entirely in software on the image as is...once again, just my understanding. I'm sure someone knows better and can fill in the details I'm missing or have wrong.

How that will impact you, I have no idea but it'll be interesting to see if it works for you tonight. Please share once you find out!

 

[MrFixit]

Out of curiosity, what model cameras?

Once again, I'm short on specific knowledge but my understanding is that there is a difference in how WDR is achieved in "True WDR" cameras and other cameras. The Darkfighter camera I was using is a "True WDR" camera so disabling the WDR in my camera may give a different result than in a camera like the DS-2CD2032-I or DS-2CD2132-I.

Just doing a bit of reading, I think the "True WDR" cameras have sensors which can rapidly take multiple images at different exposure levels and then composite them on the fly to provide you with an optimized image.

By comparison, Hikvision Cameras without the "WD" designation in the part number accomplish their WDR mode entirely in software on the image as is...once again, just my understanding. I'm sure someone knows better and can fill in the details I'm missing or have wrong.

How that will impact you, I have no idea but it'll be interesting to see if it works for you tonight. Please share once you find out!

I am using 4 of the DS-2CD2032-I and 2 of the DS-2CD2132F-IWS. As stated the only one that looks like garbage at night is the one DS-2CD2032-I that faces the driveway, All my other cams look good both day & night. My settings for all the cams are the same so I believe the trouble is the same as you found out, that the IR is causing trouble because of the pavement so I guess I will find out tonight. Its getting dark now so I should be able to report back in the next 2 hours how its working.

Just for the record my settings for all my cams are as follows--
Brightness=52
Contrast=52
Saturation=52
Hue=50
Sharpness=42
Exposure Time was 1/3 but now is 1/12
WDR was 10 but now is off
Noise Reduction Level=60 I did have this set at 100 sometime back but it caused ghosting so I lowered it

 

[hotwire]

Hi Woodsie,
Are you still happy with your 2CD4526FWD-IZH camera? Can you tell me does the camera have an Ethernet cable that comes out of the back like most of the other Hikvision cameras? Or do you bring your cat5 into the camera and terminate the rj45 inside the camera?

 

[woodsie]

Hi Woodsie,
Are you still happy with your 2CD4526FWD-IZH camera? Can you tell me does the camera have an Ethernet cable that comes out of the back like most of the other Hikvision cameras? Or do you bring your cat5 into the camera and terminate the rj45 inside the camera?

Yep, still working well. I got another one and put it on the porch. That one is even better in that location as it does not have a massive light sink in the form of a asphalt driveway in front of it. The detail I can see on the porch in pitch black is considerably sharper than any of the other cheap cameras that I have up anywhere else in similar locations and it definitely outperforms the darkfighter driveway cam.

These cameras do not have a pigtail (Ethernet cable) coming out the back. Rather they have an female Ethernet jack that is recessed into the back. I didn't have any problems with that and in a way it's probably a little easier to install and a little more robust than the pig tail connections but for my purposes it is splitting hairs. Not a factor in my decision to buy or not.

 

[hotwire]

Have you tried running the cameras in color mode at night? I'm curious to know how the picture compares to B/W mode at night? I'm guessing that you would have to have more ambient light.

 

[Frank van der Heide]

I wonder if you ever found the right settings for your Darkfighter. I'm struggling with the same issues. Hope you can post your optimal settings here.

 

[triumph202]

Have you tried turning the WDR off? I've found exactly the same issue with some DS-2CD2342WD-I that I run with visible LED lighting, the picture is a lot worse when it's on at night.

 

[Frank van der Heide]

Have you tried turning the WDR off? I've found exactly the same issue with some DS-2CD2342WD-I that I run with visible LED lighting, the picture is a lot worse when it's on at night.

I have quite the opposite experience. With WDR on and slight gain i get the best full colour picture at night.

Here is a sample video with settings overlay in the below right corner:
If anyone can advice how to further optimize the image, i would be very gratefull. I have more samples if needed/wanted.

 

[mlapaglia]

Your camera is running in day mode and there is a lot of light on that street, so WDR will have a positive effect.

 

[triumph202]

I was talking about using my 2CD2342WD-I in day mode as well. But it's obviously got a far less sensitive sensor and my "lighting" is substandard in comparison (10 Watt LED spot lights.)

Frank, it looks like you've got a decent shutter speed for that footage too? I need to go down to 1/25th (or even lower), I'm looking forward to comparing it to my Dahua 2mp Starlight.

PS: I did find by default the gain on the sensor for my 2342 was up at 100 on all four of mine. Knocking that back down to around 85 improves noise levels but needs to be compensated for with the brightness setting.

 

[Frank van der Heide]

I was talking about using my 2CD2342WD-I in day mode as well. But it's obviously got a far less sensitive sensor and my "lighting" is substandard in comparison (10 Watt LED spot lights.)

Frank, it looks like you've got a decent shutter speed for that footage too? I need to go down to 1/25th (or even lower), I'm looking forward to comparing it to my Dahua 2mp Starlight.

I also have one 2CD2342WD-I running, but it cannot handle the movement during night time with the camera on daylight setting. That is the main reason why i bought the Hikvision Darkfighter, but i am not fully satisfied by it's peformance. I have also ordered a Dahua Starlight PTZ, same. I hope to get it within the next 2-3 weeks.

BTW, I am using shutter speed 1/25.