Need advice for parking lot surveillance camera

[cobra2000]

Hello to all. Just getting started here and need a suggestion for a parking lot cam. The parking lot is approximately 120 ft away to the far edge from mounting location of the cam by my guesstimate. I would like to capture the whole lot with good detail all of the time, not just focused on a small area. I'm concerned that if I zoom in too much, I'll lose some of the coverage of the lot. I have poor lighting provided by a couple nearby street lights, but lot is not pitch black at night.

I was looking at the IPC-HFW5241E-Z12E and the IPC-B5442E-Z4E that Andy from Empire Tech sells on Amazon. I'd prefer a bullet cam. I realize that these will zoom in fairly close, especially the Z12E, but I would like entire lot coverage at all times. License plate detail would be nice, facial detail is important. Are these cams overkill for what I want to accomplish? Are there any better cams out there to do what I need that don't cost a fortune?

I'll attach a photo of the vantage point of where I'll be installing the camera. This is at wide 7mm focal length on my camera's lens. Sorry, the photo is not too sharp and taken through a window, but gives a idea of what I'm dealing with. The blacktop lot in the background is from another business. The concrete lot is the one I'm dealing with. The phone poles in the center and right foreground of the photo both have street lamps, but they are facing away from my lot.

 

[wittaj]

One camera is not the be all, see all.

Those are great cams you have selected, but you will need multiple cameras to cover what you want.

An overview camera to see an image like you have here is one type of camera, but will not give you details.

A camera to zoom in to the area you want details on will not be a good overview camera.

One camera will not be able to read all the plates in the lot at one time.

You need several cameras to then get facial details at various locations.

What about someone walking away from this vantage point door checking, need a camera looking back this way.

While limited and not the preferred choice as a stand alone solution, an autotracking camera like the 49225 from Andy would be your closest solution. But it has limitations like looking at the wrong place while something else is happening, but it can be a great compliment to other cameras.

 

[IAmATeaf]

Also the cams you have listed are variable zoom, so the idea is you setup your field of view and leave them, they are not intended to be used to actively zoom in and out, what you want for that is a PTZ.

Also as already pointed out one cam, even a PTZ won’t do, at min you’ll need 4, one at each corner pointing in but if the space is too big then you may need more as it’s good to have cams whose view overlaps.

 

[Nexlarsecurity]

The placement surveillance camera layout is one the important aspect of design of surveillance project. The correct spam link removed security camera need take all the possible viewing target, reduce the existence of blind spot. For achieving that purpose, the more security cameras, the better, but it's obviously untrue. For the purpose of achieving above objects and without increasing the quantity of security camera at the same time, it's necessary to design a good layout for placement of security camera on the basis of limited security camera.

 

[samplenhold]

You can use the camera view calculator at this site to see what you can do with each cam:
IPVM Camera Calculator V3

Take into account the points made above, except by Nexlar as I can't understand what this person is talking about.