@gansle, as
@Parley stated you can force any camera into color at night and this particular cam does very well due to optics and sensor as I mention in my review. The question I often get asked however is '
should you force color for night' and my personal answer is,
depends on your install location and specifically, lighting. In about 80%+ of residential installs, cameras should generally NOT be forced into color at night, this is primarily due to lighting not being adequate to enable a fast enough shutter speed to reduce motion blur of the target / object you are trying to capture. Unfortunately a lot of people will lower shutter speed to an incredibly slow value OR worst yet set to AUTO mode (which you should avoid at all costs). As a rule of thumb I guide people that you want a minimum of 1/60 for slow walking / loitering speed, 1/125 for faster walking (someone that doesn't want to hang around) as well as
slow vehicles and about 1/250 for moving vehicles. 1/125 is a happy medium if you are expecting a mix of targets in a location. Depending on your needs for the target location (capturing people, vehicles etc) then set those shutter speeds at night (in color first) and look at the resulting image, if too dark to make out details etc then you are way better off in black and white. This camera is exceptional at night (as you may have seen in my review) BUT even it, like most cameras needs lighting
Now to expand on options further, I'm a huge advocate (as I know others are including Parley) for covering a given area with multiple cameras and in that case you can always mix up your night captures. For example, 1 fixed cam to capture color details (clothing, vehicle color etc) and a 2nd (could be the PTZ called to preset by PTZ activation from the 1st cam which I highly recommend) to capture important details such as facial attributes, clean, crisp motion of what was going on in the environment etc. If you want to round that setup out completely, you add a third camera (complimenting, not duplicating) for LPR work and boom there is your trifecta for 1 solution of people / vehicle night captures.
Again all depends on your final selection(s) of camera, targets you want to capture, and most importantly install location and lighting but hopefully gives you ideas on how you can integrate this into your overall setup.
Let me know with any questions
HTH
Will it stay in color mode all night? I just got 1 5442 vari focal. Eventually would lke to get this 4mp 25x to replace a 2mp 30x non starlight.