Yep, just to jump in, you will not get a plate from the field of view, nor will any 3rd party plate reader be able to either.
If you want to see things far away, you need optical zoom, digital zoom only works in the movies and TV. And the image looks kinda washed out like you have too much WDR on, which will impact the ability to zoom in as well. You can make out it is possibly an older model maroon/red Toyota Camry, maybe 2008-2015 model.
It is basically the same information we provided to you previously regarding being able to IDENTIFY someone at a distance, except now it is for an even smaller plate.
After lots of study and recommendations I installed
IPC-T5442T-ZE. I wanted to get some feedback to see what are the things I could improve to ID a person in this situation. Few things about this footage: You will notice that when suspect is by the car facing towards the camera, the distance...
ipcamtalk.com
Regarding a camera for plates (
LPR) - keep in mind that this is a camera dedicated to plates and not an overview camera also. It is as much an art as it is a science. It is why you cannot read them now with your current camera.
For LPR we need to zoom in tight to make the plate as large as possible. For most of us, all you see is the not much more than a vehicle in the entire frame. Now maybe in the right location during the day it might be able to see some other things, but not at night.
At night, we have to run a very fast shutter speed (1/2,000) and in B/W with IR and the image will be black. All you will see are head/tail lights and the plate. Some people can get away with color if they have enough street lights, but most of us cannot. Here is a representative sample of plates I get at night of vehicles traveling about 45MPH at 175 feet from my 2MP camera (that is all that is needed for plates):
Guessing at the distance you would be based on the image, I do not think the ZE varifocal you have now would be able to get the plates fully zoomed in either. You would need the 5442-Z4E (and that is probably pushing it), or the 5241-Z12E. Since they are the same price, I would go with the one with more zoom.