security camera envio starvis 5mpx IMX335: very bad quality at night

[deleterepeat]

Hi, i've purchased this camera Hybrid Bullet 3.6mm Ir Led 5MP 2592X1944 OSD UTC IP66 . During the day the quality is real good, when it's night the result i pretty horrible. There is a street lamp 27-28 feet away from the camera and then there are some lights coming from the near houses. The image has a lot of digital noise and i tried anything i could as setting. I'm wondering if i made a mistake with the purchase ( sensor bad at night). I have another security camera xvi which has 1/2.7" Progressive Scan CMOS marked as Sony and the imagine is pretty good in both scenarios. I also tried 2 cams sony starvis IMX335 and the result is the same. Any suggest for the settings? Or change for another camera?

 

[sebastiantombs]

You need to remember that fractions are deceiving. The 1/2.9" sensor on that camera is smaller, not larger, than your other camera. This reduces the amount of light getting to each pixel.

1/2.9" = .345"
1/2.7" = .370"

The current resolution/sizes for good night performance are -

2MP 1/2.8"
4MP 1/1.8"
8MP 1/1.2"

Your camera would need a sensor of about 1/1.5" to perform well at night. You may be able to adjust gain and exposure compensation, or add additional infrared light to improve the video but do not lower the shutter speed below 1/60, 16.66 milliseconds, or you will introduce too much blurring with motion.

Do not chase megapixels, chase sensor size..

 

[mat200]

FYI - camera discussed

 

[The Automation Guy]

Don't be afraid to get into the camera settings and play around. You will find you get better results if you use manual settings instead of automatic settings. In general, try to set a manual shutter speed with speeds going down as low as 1/50th of a second or so. Set a gain setting with a range of 0 to maybe 70-80 (on a scale of 0-100). Turn the noise reduction (2d and 3d) down some.

Unfortunately there is no "correct setting" that everyone can use and get good results. You are going to have to play around with these settings and see what type of result you can get yourself. Make a change, and then walk around the scene at night to see how the performance is going to be. Don't get tricked into thinking that a static image is going to be good. You need to have a moving subject to test with. If these settings produce too dark an image, then you can try increasing the shutter and gain, but when you get on the upper ranges of these settings, the quality really goes down. You may have to increase the amount of light in the area before you will get good usable footage that doesn't have blurring motion and/or ghosting subjects (where a moving subject seems to be partly or fully transparent/invisible).