I purchased the 4MP version (SD49425) of this camera from
@EMPIRETECANDY via his Amazon store last week and have been playing with it since it arrived.
A quick summary of my thoughts on this camera.
The auto tracking right of the box is unbelievable. Better than any I have seen straight out of the box.
Of course to get better performance you need to tweak the values to get the shot you are looking for. But I would certainly recommend this to someone that doesn't want to spend a lot of time trying to dial it in.
I simply created a preset, which was a zoom of 1 so it was as wide as it gets. I drew a few tripwires. And it was tracking perfectly. Even with a lamp post in the yard that based on distances, the person disappears behind it momentarily based on where the PTZ is mounted, and it keeps right up with the person. I have seen lots of videos where a PTZ will go screwy with something like that.
The AI is unbelievable. I didn't want it tracking cars going up and down the street all day, so I picked humans and almost zero false trackings. It will occasionally pick up a trailer being pulled by a pickup that has lawnmowers in it, but I think the Human AI is actually to pick up anything but vehicles.
If I wanted to track vehicles, this thing can keep up with them and the path is a straight left-right/right-left format - cars are not approaching the house head on, so they go by at a good clip - posted 25mph but probably 40mph.
In the Live setting I wish the preset numbers would change to the names you call them in the set up. Easier to remember Street than a preset number LOL.
Would also be nice if you could dial in a focus setting number if you wanted to do some overnight LPR duty like you can with his other cams.
The focus seems a little soft. I probably need to work on the settings a little more. In messing around with it, I can't get it as crisp as I think it is capable of. I noticed if you zoom all the way out, it has trouble focusing, even manually it is at it's limit. I can actually hit the zoom + sign like 7 or 8 times before it moves from zoom 1 to zoom 2, so I have it set to like 4 + hits within zoom 1 to give the focus some room to find it.
For being starlight, it kicks into B/W faster than my other Starlights purchased from Andy. I can force color and it works, so I am trying to figure out the API call to knock it into B/W later in the night and be color the other times.
I have been using for some time the spotter cams concept to try to make sure the PTZ is looking where activity is, and will certainly continue that with this camera as well. This camera seems to be a little too long of a lag from moving to a preset and pulling up the IVS and start tracking, so I am attempting to adjust when my spotter cams kick in. Unfortunately at night, bugs and headlight glare and other things would turn the PTZ for something that wasn't there.
Seeing how good the AI is, I am contemplating replacing one of the spotter cams with an AI cam to knock out all the false movements.
