POE cameras with best night vision

raj2986

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Hello everyone! First post! Hoping you folks could help me with an issue my company is having. We have a decent size warehouse with 16 POE cameras mostly Amcrest 2k units but also some Dahua 3 and 4k units running BI5 on our server. Anyway we have been having some thefts at night occurring and between all 16 cameras the night vision is poor making all our footage useless. I am looking for some tips or suggestions on how to improve night vision or suggestions on newer IPC hardware that has clear night vision. The major problem is most of our cameras at night have what I call a ghosting effect where the video seems to have a trail making movement really blurred in most cases. Also more related to the Amcrest cameras is in night mode on any initial movements the camera seems to lockup for a few seconds causing studdering. At first i though it was our server but even when logged into the camera directly this issue persists. At this point were not opposed to new hardware as long as it has great clear night vision. Our dedicated NVR is running a i7 8700 with a Quadro P4000. BI5 is setup to use the GPU as the decoder and all but 1 camera is running h.264 and the newer one running h.265.
 

aristobrat

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Dahua/Hikvision cameras that use a 4MP 1/1.8” or 2MP 1/2.8” image sensor are the best bang for the buck in terms of low-light performance. Even these sensors can have some motion blur when the light level is really low, but it should be significantly less than what’s found in the consumer-grade models from Amcrest, Lorex, etc.

The forum has a great vendor named Andy (@EMPIRETECANDY) that makes ordering them easy. He can resell most models from Dahua’s International lineup. I’m calling that out specifically because Dahua’s US lineup doesn’t carry many of the popular International models, so you won’t find them on Dahua US reseller sites like B&H etc.

Here’s a review of a popular model:
Review-OEM 4mp AI Cam IPC-T5442TM-AS Starlight+
 

bigredfish

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Sample footage and settings from the sample camera would help diagnose your problem. Motion blur can be due to too little light and/or too low exposure setting
 

SouthernYankee

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1) Motion blur can be caused by running BI headless.

2) In general there are no 4k (8MP) cameras in the affordable range that work well at night. Unless you have a very good light source.
3) Use Dahua starlight cameras or Hikvision darkfighter cameras if you need good low light cameras.
4) Need video examples.
5) Your cameras may be mounted to high. (Looney2ns)If you want to be able to ID faces, don't mount cams higher than 8ft. You want to know who did it, not just what happened.



IPC-T5442TM-AS-LED Review IPC-T5442TM-AS-LED (Full Color, Starlight+) - 4MP starlight
IPC-T5442TM-AS Review-OEM 4mp AI Cam IPC-T5442TM-AS Starlight+ - 4MP starlight+
IPC-T2347G-LU Review of the Hikvision OEM model IPC-T2347G-LU 'ColorVu' IP CCTV camera. (DS-2CD2347G1-LU)
IPC-HDW2231R-ZS Review-Dahua IPC-HDW2231RP-ZS Starlight Camera-Varifocal
IPC-HDW2231T-ZS-S2 Review-OEM IPC-T2231T-ZS 2mp Varifocal Starlight Camera
 

raj2986

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Sorry for the late reply been a busy week. Anyway turns out most of my problems actually had to do with my current Nvidia drivers. I was getting an error that BI failed to initialize GPU decoding so it was running software based (my fault for not checking the error log more often). I switched to Intel decoding for now until i solve the Nvidia driver issue but after the switch it made a difference right away. motion is much more fluid. Also I cut the 4k camera to 2k so I could get 30fps so thanks for that suggestion. Also I found one of our POE switches which has the Amcrest cameras has bad cable to our MDF which was causing the cameras on that switch to glitch out.

Thank you for all the suggestions. Depending on how Q1 ends for us we may be looking at some new cameras in the next few months.
 
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bradner

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Hello everyone! First post! Hoping you folks could help me with an issue my company is having. We have a decent size warehouse with 16 POE cameras mostly Amcrest 2k units but also some Dahua 3 and 4k units running BI5 on our server. Anyway we have been having some thefts at night occurring and between all 16 cameras the night vision is poor making all our footage useless. I am looking for some tips or suggestions on how to improve night vision or suggestions on newer IPC hardware that has clear night vision. The major problem is most of our cameras at night have what I call a ghosting effect where the video seems to have a trail making movement really blurred in most cases. Also more related to the Amcrest cameras is in night mode on any initial movements the camera seems to lockup for a few seconds causing studdering. At first i though it was our server but even when logged into the camera directly this issue persists. At this point were not opposed to new hardware as long as it has great clear night vision. Our dedicated NVR is running a i7 8700 with a Quadro P4000. BI5 is setup to use the GPU as the decoder and all but 1 camera is running h.264 and the newer one running h.265.
Add a bunch of external IR illuminators in your warehouse and it will greatly help in the night vision quality. Should be pretty easy since in indoors and likely plenty of power sources available. The ghosting is from a slow shutter speed due to low lighting. You could try tweaking the camera settings but adding IR lights would be super easy to do rather than getting "better" cameras first. You don't need 30fps either, 15 is plenty - makes it easier on BI. Drop your fps and boost the cameras bit rate. Oh, set all your cams to H264 as BI doesn't play nice with H265 I've read.
 
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