Review-I'll be the guinea pig for the new SD59225U-HNI PTZ.

I am still on September 2016 fw also Solar Deity. Not budging until Andy says so.
 
You may be right with his camera expertise. I don't know his technical background. As a good salesman I know Andy has reached out to his customers who are having success with this camera to try and help those that are not happy. Here is a customers night video.



I am impressed how much Andy is working with everyone to see they are happy.
 
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I am adding IR illumination to 3 sides of my house at least. Any help I can give it to get the results I expect. My first big camera purchase so I had no clue what to expect. I do agree everyone is entitled to their opinion and I made that clear in an earlier post. This is a good place with lots of help from many different walks of life. Heck no I don't want to lose friends over a camera. I respect your opinion. It's all good.
 
Andy asked me to post this for the benefit of @Frank van der Heide, @Hound Dog 911, and @ljw2k, because he cares and wants to help. Maybe I was too harsh in my earlier statements.....?

For starters, I've been running the September, 2016 firmware on three of these with excellent results.

View attachment 18230

Second, for the best auto tracking results, you have to calibrate your scene in the global IVS tab, for each preset. There are no instructions, so here goes.

View attachment 18231 View attachment 18232

Measure a known portion of your scene for best results. You add a calibration from the global IVS tab, then draw a box on your preset scene. Edit the box to known dimensions from your measurements. It's easiest to draw when in full screen. A double click on the small view to the left will make it full screen. You then need to add 1 horizontal ruler and three vertical rulers of known distances. It's best to vary the ruler lengths, unlike my examples above. In the example with the mailbox, I would make the vertical rulers .5 meters, 1 meter and 1.5 meters respectively. You HAVE to click inside the box for the rulers to appear and save. You can edit the lengths (full screen is best for this) after you set them inside the calibration box. Try to be as accurate as practical. I paced mine off. I wasn't out there with a ruler!

I am not in front of my camera GUI so I will post the other settings from the global IVS tab ASAP, when I get home from work. Anti Disturb is off, along with Shadow Scene. I left the sensitivity at 5, as It got wonky at higher settings, and sometimes didn't even track at lower settings. I'll post the Tracking Overlap, Tracking Distance and the Tracking Time sliders for you all.

Lastly, here are some tracking demos of Fed Ex and the Mailman. The tracking is smooth and framed and works for my purposes. I get license plates regularly. They are in the day, and through a double paned window, and I ran out of glass real estate. I realize you guys want night tracking, but I'm still in a temporary setting as the weather has not cooperated to install the 14 cameras (3 homes) with the lift. I will install one of these SD59's outside tonight and get some install pictures as well. Then we can get some real tracking demos.





SD


@Solar Deity , I really appreciate this. Thanks for coming round and helping in this way. I am still hoping for improvement with this camera. Finally some realtime assistance with pictures and explanation, which is higly appreciated. Looking forward to setting it up the way it should be, with your help.
 
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Does focusing affect the non auto tracking version of this camera? The thread for that lies dead with no reference to focusing issues. Just curious if anyone knows. Also, there's a general observation that this camera ir isn't strong enough? Frankly this thread is hard to keep up with.
 
I'm not falling out with anyone especially over a camera but I am just posting my findings on an open forum and everyone has their own opinions which will be different always a little like buying a car each model and make will have good & bad things about them.

I am adding IR illumination to 3 sides of my house at least. Any help I can give it to get the results I expect. My first big camera purchase so I had no clue what to expect. I do agree everyone is entitled to their opinion and I made that clear in an earlier post. This is a good place with lots of help from many different walks of life. Heck no I don't want to lose friends over a camera. I respect your opinion. It's all good.

@Solar Deity , I really appreciate this. Thanks for coming round and helping in this way. I am still hoping for improvement with this camera. Finally some realtime assistance with pictures and explanation, which is higly appreciated. Looking forward to setting it up the way it should be, with your help.

Agree with everyone all on all counts. We will persevere.

My install was interrupted by my crazy neighbor, for whom these cameras are being installed for. The hard part is done of running the wires through the future tube, in the attic and out the corner mount.

How Ironic. He wanted to fight everyone in the street last night, barefoot and shirtless. He doesn't handle his liquor well.....

IMG_5439.JPG IMG_5441.JPG IMG_5442.JPG IMG_5445.JPG Corner Mount Web.jpg

SD
 
I am looking at the New Dahua below and just waiting reviews.
SD6AE240V-HNI

Reviews will probably be better on this unit, but the cost is over $1000 too!

Does focusing affect the non auto tracking version of this camera? The thread for that lies dead with no reference to focusing issues. Just curious if anyone knows. Also, there's a general observation that this camera ir isn't strong enough? Frankly this thread is hard to keep up with.

Definitely slow auto-focus and frequent need to manual focus (especially in low light) on the non auto tracking version too. I'm wondering exactly what the global calibration settings do. Is it strictly an auto-tracking thing or is it focus-related in that it would improve focus on the non auto tracking version too? The latest firmware updates have removed the global calibration, but I'd be willing to go back to the old version if this could improve things...

What also gets me is that the calibration seems to be connected to presets as you have to select a preset before adding the calibration rulers. Makes me wonder if this calibration only becomes active when that particular preset is selected. On auto tracking, we're not jumping to presets, rather we're just panning and tilting based on motion detection algorithms. Makes me wonder if this really has anything to do with auto tracking or if it's designed to specifically control the focus on a given preset.
 
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Lol! Just a quicky on the extra IR; do you need to have the red glowing wavelength or do the invisible IR emitters also have thesame/good effects?

I remember reading that you need higher wattage on non-visible ir, right?
 
Can someone post some video zoomed with ir? I'd like to see how the ir responds while zooming and how dispersed it is when at full zoom.
 
You may be right with his camera expertise. I don't know his technical background. As a good salesman I know Andy has reached out to his customers who are having success with this camera to try and help those that are not happy. Here is a customers night video.



I am impressed how much Andy is working with everyone to see they are happy.



That would be one of my videos.

I sorta have been AWOL with work but noticed a lot of people are having issues with focus etc.

Speaking from personal experience, don't over do it with the IR, but also don't under do it, find a balance, this will assist in auto-tracking.
Also make sure you have decent contrast, autofocus and auto tracking both require it to function.

Lastly, make sure your target areas are within a set range, otherwise it will have issues in auto tracking mode, camera is doing 10 things at once while it's trying to track, so avoid having the trigger point really really really far away, have it closer up for best experience. :)

Pro tip
Set contrast to 55-58, then adjust your exposure.
If your movement tracking boxes stop appearing on movement, your exposure or brightness levels are too high.

Once you have that right, zoom into the same point 100-200m away and keep adjusting until the camera auto focuses quickly.

Once you have that right, it should work a lot better.
 
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Ok, got it. My intrusion box is set at about 30m.

View attachment 18347

If that was my setup, I'd setup one starlight looking down that road to capture plates/people, while another looked down the other direction to do the same, finally one cheap starlight VF to capture plates at night.
Then I'd set the PTZ auto tracking zone even closer, eg where that drain cover is, get more left to right tracking rather then up/down, while three starlights covered off fixed ID points but that's more my preference. :)

Also I'd be running black and white mode there, makes a huge difference with auto tracking/ID at night.
See here:

Vs



Does the movement tracking box pop up on people/cars down the road before they get closer to the trigger point?
 
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Re Auto Focus issues, as I said before, set up for high contrast.

Forced Colour Mode test:


vs

IR Mode:


As you can see, the contrast defines solid lines which assists the camera and AF in focusing.

I actually turned down the IR after filming that video which has made it even quicker.
 
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