Here you can see how my 5231 performs:
Wind Turbine Live Camera - Zeewolde, The Netherlands - YouTube
Between 5:00 and 22:00 Shutter time is set to 1/3.
Like wxman said, when the clouds are much lighter then ground level, it compensates too much.
At least that's better then frying the sensor.
Do you have WDR on? If not, you should be able to crank that up and help flatten out the brightness extremes between clouds and ground. The bigger issue I've had with Dahua is when too much sky gets in the picture, the white balance goes crazy. All the blue from the sky tricks the processor into thinking there's strong florescent lighting in the scene and it cranks up the red channel to compensate...The end result is the sky turns purple and the grass turns redish/brown...
The Hikvisions will compensate some for this, but not nearly as extreme as the Dahua does, in my experience. Especially the 3mp Hikvisions where the increased vertical field of view allows you to keep lots of ground and sky both in the scene...With yours being mounted on a tall tower, you've got an unusually long distance view, which is allowing you to equally balance out ground and sky. This probably helps prevent white balance issues for you. For most people that have a more limited distance view however, it's difficult to equal out ground and sky coverage (because when doing so, the "close" horizon prevents them from getting enough distant sky in view to determine weather conditions)
Thanks for the suggestion. What particular model from Hikvision would you recommend?
As far as color reproduction and cloud/sky watching, the best I've found in my experience is the original 3mp DS-2CD2032-I (or the newer version of it supporting H.265 encoding, which is DS-2CD2035-I )...A little noisy at night, but daytime performance from a weather cam aspect is unmatched, in my opinion....There are newer versions of 3mp cams from Hikvision with ultra low light sensitivity that may actually work better, but I've yet to see them tested as a weathercam to ensure they handle the sky color properly. It seems they probably would, though.
You've got a fairly decent long distance view, so you may still be able to get enough ground and sky into the scene to use a Dahua without having white balance issues, although you'd definitely still benefit by having the extra vertical field of view from the Hikvision 3mp.
As others have mentions, your scene could also be an interesting one for a PTZ. Especially for zooming in on distant storm clouds and such. The Huisun mini-PTZ discussed on this board would ordinarily be a great match for this scene from a visual perspective (as it uses the same processor brand that Hikvision uses with the better color reproduction), however I can't really recommend them due to the high number of failure rates. The speed domes with wiper (sold under the name "Yunch") may be a good choice. They seem to be pretty solid, use the better image processor and the added wiper definitely has value for keeping the lens clear during stormy weather. So many times I've missed good views of the back side of storms because of water drops being splotched all over the lens.
Regardless of what you use, fixed or PTZ, I would recommend having some small cover over the camera to block most of the rain and hail from hitting it. Some put them under an overhang on their house. I have mine out in the middle of the yard on a post with a small piece of plywood on top of the post to shield the cam somewhat. Still gets some blowing rain on the lens, but not nearly as much as if it had no protection at all...That helps a lot for me since mine doesn't have a wiper....That would also allow some hail protection. I would imagine most of these cams would survive even golfball size hail without any protection, but if you're in one of those places that deals with the extreme stuff (baseball or softball size hail), then I'd say a cover is a must for any camera, unless it's specifically rated as "vandal proof" (which is typically only found in your very expensive grade cams).
