Low-light struggles / improving image quality.

[EagleEye7]

Thanks Steve. For now, I will look into replacing the 12mm Hik with a B54IR-Z4E (bullet). I will be pleased if I can get good face ID at night in this location. I will probably leave my other spotter / overview Hik which is covering the same area alone for now, because it is fulfilling its purpose (basic overview), even if not ideal.

No doubt a while later I will be looking to perform more upgrade or add additional cameras though!

 

[EagleEye7]

The B54IR-Z4E-S3 arrived yesterday - thanks Andy

I have mounted it where the Hikvision was, and am now configuring. Further updates to follow...

P.S - Made another thread specific to a few Web UI queries, whilst I am configuring:

E

Thread 'EmpireTech web interface questions.'

Yesterday at 7:08 AM

I just installed my first EmpireTech camera, a B54IR-Z4E-S3. Below are a couple of questions regarding the web interface, which I am obviously still familiarizing with.

1. How do I (or can I?) install a HTTPS TLS certificate into the camera? On Hikvision's which are I am slightly more familiar with, I was able to load a self-signed certificate into the web interface, which was signed by a CA trusted by my PC. I know that this does not add much security, considering the cams are on a separate network, never accessed remotely directly (except over VPN), etc, but all the browser...

• EagleEye7
• Replies: 12
• Forum: IP Cameras

 

[EagleEye7]

Been dialing in a bit for day at least, started off following this advice from earlier in this thread:

Go into shutter settings and change to manual shutter and start with custom shutter as ms and change to 0-8.3ms and gain 0-50 (night) and 0-4ms exposure and 0-30 gain (day)for starters.

This is doing pretty well - running full zoom, it can even just about get some plates from the vehicles going past on the street! Yes, the angle is terrible, and no, this cam is NOT intended to capture plates! Just a good metric for comparing motion blur as settings are adjusted.


When running Manual mode during the day, is variation in light levels ever a serious problem? I guess I will find out in time, but thinking of cloud cover, then bright sunlight, etc, all causes considerable variation in the light levels...

Still have to tackle the night situation.

 

[bigredfish]

Thats why running a range (0-4) vs a static exposure (1/500) is good for daytime. It allows the camera to adapt to lighting conditions via exposure

 

[EagleEye7]

Aha - I was wondering what the difference between the two types of shutter setting was!

 

[EagleEye7]

First look at performance at night.

Running the following settings:


And its doing pretty reasonable. Here are a couple of taxi's passing in the middle of the night:


The motion blur is worse than daytime, as seen by the blur on the vehicles and their plates - however, the main interest of this cam is people / vehicles entering the driveway - a situation where movement will mostly be towards the camera, and so will likely have less of a blur issue.

Here are a couple of folk walking past at 10PM (The camera says 11PM, the time was 1HR out on the cam):

View attachment People Passing @ 10PM.mp4

Are they reasonably decent stills, or do we think there is more room for improvement?


Additionally, this is how I currently have the different settings for Day / Night setup:

And then the Night profile has slightly longer shutter times etc:

Is it correct to use a 'Working Mode' of 'Day/Night Switch'? My intent here was that the camera would switch between the Day & Night settings whenever it switches from Color to IR mode, or back again... Is this correct? The only reason I ask is that whilst footage from yesterday revealed clear plate shots (indicating low motion blur), the footage from today has slightly more blur, which made me wonder if it is actually switching between the Day/Night profiles as expected, or still using the longer Night exposure settings?

 

[Ri22o]

You will want to check your focus settings when it is in Day and again when it is switched to Night. The IR filter can slightly change the focus when it drops into place, so an adjustment of a few points might be needed.