Might want to be a little careful with the 180. That's how I think that one of mine died before it came back to life. Water seemed to have collected on the lip and then got past the seal. Shouldn't happen but when I left it sitting face down a little water came out of it.
Edit to add: Didn't really make much if any difference as far as light... same as turned the usual way so not much point to it.
Well, this is disappointing and surprising. I put frosted window film on the DI10 hoping it would scatter the IR a little better. I can't say that I see much difference with or without the film on it. Still a huge hotspot on the ground despite it being aimed upward as best as it can be.
If that is the unit on the post on the right side of the image, I'm not sure there is much you can do with the device in that location. It's physics....... You'll never get "even" coverage when some of the yard is 5' from the device and some of the yard is 25' from the unit. That's a 5:1 ratio (meaning the front is going to be 5 times brighter than the rear - not accounting for the natural falloff of the light which will make it an even higher ratio in real life)
The best solution is to mount the unit on a higher pole and/or move the unit farther back from the edge of the yard. If you mounted it on a 20' pole, then the front of the yard would be 20' from the unit and the back of the yard would be about 32' from the unit. That produces about a 1.5:1 ratio and it will be much easier to get "even" coverage then. (I realize you probably don't want to mount it on a 20' pole - I'm just using that exaggerated height to help prove my point).
Even if you left it on the 5' pole, but moved the pole 10' from the edge of the yard (farther to the right), then the front part of the yard will be 11' or so from the device will the rear part of the yard will be 35' from the yard. That a 3:1 ratio which is still likely to produce a hot spot, but it is better than the 5:1 ratio as currently installed.
The ultimate solution might be a combination of the two. If neither of those options works, then you really need to cut the output of the IR. I'd suggest getting a lower power unit, but adding a neutral density filter would work too. You still won't have even coverage, but at least you get rid of the hot spot.
I turned the IR off on my PTZ then swung it around to look at the DI10. You can see IR up against the soffit and the bottom of the gutter. I'll angle it down to see if it actually improves my hotspot issue.
Here it is angled down.
And still a nasty hotspot with it angled down.
Here it is with the DI10 angled down but with the camera's IR light turned back on to SmartIR:
Mine vary from ~6' for one, another about the same as yours, to probably ~15 and ~20' for a few others but I have two stories to work with.
The one that I have at ~6' is up and off to the side of a cam that's mounted about 3' high. It's very hot on the ground right in front of the cam but out from there beyond ~10'-12' it's good since it's pointed more out vs down as is the camera. I have that cam zoomed to get past most of that and the view that I want from it is beyond that so it works out.
The one at about where yours is I have pointed way up in the trees. That one still will blow out faces if close. But again close isn't the view that I'm going for there so don't care too much about that.
The ones at 15 and 20-ish aren't too bad but I still have them tipped way up.
All of mine are mounted generally above and behind the cam vs yours where the cam is looking directly toward the illuminator. I don't run the on-cam IR on any of mine where I have the illuminators. Even though there's more light, the cameras seem to make some internal adjustment when on and I can't get things to look as clear as when off. You can kind of see that same effect in your 10:47:35 vs 10:56:55 images above.
My 10 watt illuminator arrived today. I ordered it based on this thread. I must say it is pretty impressive for it's size. I have it installed below a varifocal 5442, and have found the picture to be better with the camera ir turned off. I have only started playing with settings, but it is a big improvement over the camera onboard leds only. I have exposure set at 1/250, no wdr, and only 20 on nr. I'm pretty happy with having no blur or excessive hotspot. My side yard has absolutely zero light.
I wish they would have put a waterproof power connector on instead of the barrel connector, but I sealed it up with a dab of dielectric on the inside and a gel coated heat shrink tube on the outside. I doubt I will need to unplug it, but I can cut it off if I need to.
Here's a quick clip I just grabbed from the Blue Iris app. It's a bit clearer on Blue Iris itself. You can see the ir does not look blown out in the center and no blur in slow motion. The varifocal is zoomed all the way out so dori is not the best. I use this camera as an overview camera.
So, I finally installed my IR emitter a couple of weeks ago, purely for LPR purposes as my camera is positioned in a letterbox behind glass. I needed a little extra IR. Anyway, I didn't have the option to have it at height and was forced to put it a ground level. It took me a bit of time to best work out how to actually install it but the images should give you an idea what I did. It does work, I'm getting more hits on licence plate numbers both front and rear. In time I will be installing 2 or 3 garden lights along where the emitter is installed, so hopefully it won't stand out as much. Having said that, my misses hasn't noticed it yet.
Well, this is disappointing and surprising. I put frosted window film on the DI10 hoping it would scatter the IR a little better. I can't say that I see much difference with or without the film on it. Still a huge hotspot on the ground despite it being aimed upward as best as it can be.
The reason you are getting such a hotspot is being caused by the fact that you have no IR near the mount point of the camera so this is being caused by having to boost exposure to be usable close to the camera, which in turn causes over exposure at the distant point where you have IR present. You would get a similar affect if you had it set to color and shined a flashlight. It would overexpose the area with light and underexpose to some degree the area without light. Even your eyes do this at night when you shine a flashlight, what makes you think a camera wouldn’t do the same thing.
Try placing the camera near the area being covered by the light. Or mounting another IR light near the front of the camera area, normally it should be mounted a few feet from it, or you would have the camera in the middle and light pointing inwards from both directions. Try setting exposure on the camera to manual and then adjusting it until the area with light isn’t overexposed or zooming the camera to where it’s focused more on just the illuminated area. That’s also why the image looked much better and not overexposed when you turned IR from the camera itself on in an earlier post.
This is 100% working as intended and you can’t do anything to fix it without adding more lights to get you better coverage or changing the scene that the camera is viewing.
I think the issue is I'm trying to do too much with that IR illuminator thinking I can kill two birds with one stone....but I can only kill one bird. The fixed camera is mounted on the the north back corner of the house. On the south back corner there is a PTZ cam. The IR illuminator was mounted the way it is to light up the woods/creek behind the house so that the PTZ could capture some night critters back there. I was hoping the IR illuminator would have the side effect of extending the range of what the fixed 2MP could see toward the south corner. I gave it the ol' college try.....FAIL. It does work great for the PTZ though.
