Test video from my IPC-T5442T-ZE ...

Left Coast Geek

Left Coast Geek

Getting comfortable
May 20, 2021
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401
mid-left coast
fairly naïve settings, 1/60th, max IR illuminator, max 12mm zoom ... I walk out from behind the trailer towards the road, and make a U turn about 120 feet from the chimney mounted camera then walk towards it, drop a bottle in the recycle bin (about 35 feet from the camera), and walk past it..



to make that better, I probably need a lot more IR lighting, eh ?
 
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Hi LCG, I think that looks good. My IPC-5442TM-AS-LED has two little white light LEDs does so well that I'm going to add them in vicinity of the other cameras. Maybe add some good solar path lights in the distance. I see white out sometimes while wearing a white t-shirt. You notice it when you get closer to the house. To much ir and the RV might start whiteing out.
 
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it was nearly completely dark out there, the moonlight was brown from high elevation smoke from the fires up north. as an amateur astornomer, I have pretty good night vision, and am comfortable with getting around in almost total darkness, I could barely sense that recycle bin I dropped the bottle in, but I know where it is, 2nd bin over right of the big old dog house.

I have a oem hikvision nitecolor like you describe, I hated the white LEDs, way too bright even turned down low. its now on the pile of spare cameras on my office floor.

I can see using it if I put light strips on my fence or something. or maybe even a strategically placed set of solar garden lights. turn off the camera's illuminator. its a 2.8mm wide angle version.
 
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I can understand people not taking to the visible light, but to me it is like a night light in the barn that I had anyway. My SD29204UE looks like a demonic head 8 foot up with glowing red eyes. If it had auto tracking, it would be down right freaky. I've thought about replacing my RV lights with something similar and a nighttime sensor to turn them on at dusk.
 
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well, up on the chimney where those cams are, shining directly down on where we park, it was nasty. in our faces as we had to walk in. this is from a similar FOV IR cam, picture that as white light in our faces as we walk towards it, no thanks.

i-hXKCgJR-X4.jpg
 
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you expect too much from that little leds in the camera... also 1/60 is too high for night view in this lighting conditions ..

what are your gain settings ? auto ? do you use fixed shutter ?
 
I understand completely. God built our eyes to adjust under varying light conditions. Like you, I am completely at home under the stars, but the wife likes a little more light! I just snapped this with only natural light and a 60 watt equivalent LED around the corner and 50 feet away.
 

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Left Coast Geek said:
fairly naïve settings, 1/60th, max IR illuminator, max 12mm zoom ... I walk out from behind the trailer towards the road, and make a U turn about 120 feet from the chimney mounted camera then walk towards it, drop a bottle in the recycle bin (about 35 feet from the camera), and walk past it..



to make that better, I probably need a lot more IR lighting, eh ?
Click to expand...

Yes, more IR is always good.
 
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I'd fool with brightness, contrast, saturation, gain and exposure compensation. I think that can be sharpened up quite a bit that way. 1/60 is about as slow as you can go without introducing motion blur. You can set a range in manual as well, in milliseconds. High side should be 16.66(1/60) low side can be as low as 0.05.
 
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In my opinion, shutter and gain are the two most important and then base the others off of it. Shutter is more important than FPS. It is the shutter speed that prevents motion blur, not FPS. 15 FPS is more than enough for surveillance cameras as we are not producing Hollywood movies.

Many people do not realize there is manual shutter that lets you adjust shutter and gain and a shutter priority that only lets you adjust shutter speed but not gain. The higher the gain, the bigger the noise and see-through ghosting start to appear because the noise is amplified. Most people select shutter priority and run a faster shutter than they should because it is likely being done at 100 gain, so it is actually defeating their purpose of a faster shutter.

Go into shutter settings and change to manual shutter and start with custom shutter as ms and change to 0-8.3ms and gain 0-50 (night) and 0-30 (day)for starters. Auto could have a shutter speed of 100ms or more with a gain at 100 and shutter priority could result in gain up at 100 which will contribute to significant ghosting and that blinding white you will get from the infrared.

Now what you will notice immediately at night is that your image gets A LOT darker. That faster the shutter, the more light that is needed. But it is a balance. The nice bright night image results in Casper during motion LOL. What do we want, a nice static image or a clean image when there is motion introduced to the scene?

So if it is too dark, then start adding ms to the time. Go to 10ms, 12ms, etc. until you find what you feel is acceptable as an image. Then have someone walk around and see if you can get a clean shot. Try not to go above 16.67ms (but certainly not above 30ms) as that tends to be the point where blur starts to occur. Conversely, if it is still bright, then drop down in time to get a faster shutter.

You can also adjust brightness and contrast to improve the image.

You can also add some gain to brighten the image - but the higher the gain, the more ghosting you get. Some cameras can go to 70 or so before it is an issue and some can't go over 50.

But adjusting those two settings will have the biggest impact. The next one is noise reduction. Want to keep that as low as possible. Depending on the amount of light you have, you might be able to get down to 40 or so at night (again camera dependent) and 20-30 during the day, but take it as low as you can before it gets too noisy. Again this one is a balance as well. Too smooth and no noise can result in soft images and contribute to blur.

Do not use backlight features until you have exhausted every other parameter setting. And if you do have to use backlight, take it down as low as possible. HLC at 50, unless for LPR, will certainly degrade the image with motion.
 
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cool. setting my day settings per what you gave, but using WDR of about 25, is giving me good daylight shadow detail. WDR and the shadows are just too black, and if i bring up the brightness, the whites are too white. odd, but the gamma doesn't seem to do much, I frequently use gamma of around 1.6 or 1.7 on my other sorts of (non-security) photos and videos

I'll have to wait for night to play with those settings.
 
Either add white light or more external IR if you want more clarity further from the camera. As mentioned, 1/60 is kinda minimum, 1/120 is better but you’ll need more light of one kind or the other.
 
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so, I want a 850nm IR spotlight that will illuminate a fairly narrow cone, maybe 20 or 30 degrees (I need to measure this), to light up an area about 100 feet from the light. It needs to be properly weather proof as it likely will end up mounted on a pipe on top of my roof. most of what I'm seeing on the likes of Amazon are wide angle floods.
 
You have a lot of noise try reversing the 3D NR to 50 and 2D NR to 30, also lower the sharpness to about 25-30, this will also reduce the noise.
 
That's my one complaint about the T5442T-ZEs - the IR isn't all that great at distance. Add some stronger IR and you'll greatly improve things.

In fact, for whatever reason, with the exact same settings mine works better with the IR on it turned off and just relying on that from other cams that I have lighting the same area.
 
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