Hikvision 4K PTZ 36x Zoom Camera - Model DS-2DF8836IV-AELW

[Tuckerdude]

Hey Folks...

I've haven't done a camera review before, but thought this would be a good one start with as I haven't seen it reviewed anywhere!

I purchased this camera to replace the 1080P 36x Camera I had been using to monitor the main driveway of the house. This was after I had purchased my first couple of 4K bullet cameras and seeing what a huge visual improvement they provide.

So I bit the bullet and bought one of these and so far I am very happy with it. Here's a picture of it just out of the box:



It may not come through in the picture, but this thing is HUGE! I've been installing fairly good-sized PTZ's for a while now, but was surprised at how much "beefier" this one feels. It's about 30% larger than my next sized down PTZ. It's also quite heavy, but Hikvision does a good job of thinking through the mounting process and overall it was pretty straightforward to hang up on my house. But given the weight, I decided to build a reinforced wooden base that I could screw into the overhang and then mount the camera to it. Here's a picture of it mounted:



In terms of picture quality, I have to say I am impressed! It's got vibrant color, high sharpness, and the zoom on it is amazing. Here are two pictures...the first showing it's default position, and then the same view but zoomed all the way into the Waste Bin at the end of the driveway.




I find it quite impressive that you can actually read the numbers on the side of the can from such a long distance, as well as see individual raindrops!

The camera's web interface is also quite feature rich, with some interesting functions that I'm just starting to try out. The most interesting one is the "Smart Tracking" feature, which once enabled the camera will track a moving subject completely autonomously. Here's a link to a YouTube video showing the feature in action:


A couple of other things to mention....first is the little "windshield wiper". At first I thought it was just a novelty, but I find it quite useful during the heavy rains we get here, and it does a good job of keeping the glass clean. It's also quite power-hungry and I found myself needing to use it's (included) POE injector to provide it with dedicated power, versus hanging it off my quite heavy duty POE switch. For some reason, it just wasn't up to supplying the camera with all the juice it needed, especially at night with the IR LED's on. One last thing...for some reason, the focus controls in the Blue Iris interface don't work. If I want to adjust the focus, I have to go the camera's web interface. But that's the only thing that doesn't work from Blue Iris.

At any rate...I'm super happy with this! Now if they could only shrink this capability down to the size of the little Amcrest PTZ's, then we'd be in business. I'm sure at some point this stuff will trickle down. But for now, this baby is a nice addition to the system.

Cheers!

 

[Parley]

How are the night time pictures?

 

[Tuckerdude]

They are really nice...also quite sharp! One thing I've noticed is that when you pan around at night, there is a much more pronounced "blocky-effect" that you can see on the screen. It's only there while you are panning, and within a quarter of a second, it resolves again and looks clear (once you stop moving). It's visible during the day, but more obvious at night. It may be the fact that it's 4K and so many pixels are getting changed at once? But as I said, it's only visible during the actual panning/movement and then quickly disappears.

 

[mikeyhelikesit]

They are really nice...also quite sharp! One thing I've noticed is that when you pan around at night, there is a much more pronounced "blocky-effect" that you can see on the screen. It's only there while you are panning, and within a quarter of a second, it resolves again and looks clear (once you stop moving). It's visible during the day, but more obvious at night. It may be the fact that it's 4K and so many pixels are getting changed at once? But as I said, it's only visible during the actual panning/movement and then quickly disappears.

Can you read a license plate # during the day and night?

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

 

[Tuckerdude]

Well...I'm not able to point it at a license plate atm, but here's a drain cover that's pretty far away from the camera and you can clearly read the raised lettering on the cover:

 

[bp2008]

Very nice!

It is using a custom flavor of PoE they're calling "High-PoE" (often called "hi-poe" I think) which most switches don't support. I believe it sends power down all 8 wires of the cat cable (kind of like two PoE+ feeds) and normal switches just aren't designed for that.

Check what is selected in the dropdown list of Blue Iris camera properties > PTZ/Control tab > Network IP. There are two Hikvision entries and an ONVIF entry which might work better or worse. (for focus control -- another thing to check is diagonal movement)

As for your blocky appearance while panning, make sure you have maxed out the bit rate in this camera's web interface.

I notice your screenshots are only 2560x1440 (50% of 4K). If you don't have a 4K monitor for this yet, this is a really good one without most of the flaws that other large 4K panels have: http://a.co/hyKdpU4

Another easy way to pull native resolution snapshots is to use the snapshot button in the upper right corner of UI3. Or in Blue Iris you can right click the camera and choose "Snapshot" and BI should record a jpeg.

 

[Tuckerdude]

bp...as always, you Da Man!!!!

Just tried changing the PTZ control to the first Hikvision entry and Viola, the focus controls are working inside of BI!

I am running a triple monitor setup for my desktop (which I grabbed the screnshot from), and my primary monitor is a 4K Dell Ultrasharp UP3216Q. It's pretty nice, but I tend to run my desktop install of BI on my left-side monitor which is 2560x1440.

But for grins, I went ahead and bump the bitrate all the way up (16,384 Kbps) and then used UI3 to take a snapshot:



Please note, that it's raining quite heavily at the moment, so there's a bit of noise in there...but otherwise, pretty darn good shot IMHO.

 

[Parley]

Much better at night than I anticipated. Looks good.

 

[bp2008]

Nice. Do you have any really long views there? That close, the area is flooded with IR from the camera I'm sure.

 

[Tuckerdude]

Too much rain tonight to do it justice! I will grab a long distance shot tomorrow assuming better conditions.

 

[bp2008]

This is from one of my dad's radio repeater sites. One of the cheap 2MP dahua starlight PTZs. Its IR is actually turned off, but it is in black and white mode doing 1 second exposures.

 

[Tuckerdude]

Hey bp...check this out. I took a snapshot from UI3 with the camera pointed at the mountains. The first picture is 1x Zoom and the second one is 36x Zoom. I highlighted the spot of the zoom with a red circle to give you a frame of reference when you look at the zoomed in picture...enjoy!

 

[bp2008]

Hahaha, nice! This is from my best PTZ (Dahua DH-SD6A230-HN, about 4 years old now!). It is a 2MP 30x.



Long zoom is fun to play with on a clear day.

 

[Tuckerdude]

agreed! Btw...I tried your suggestion about bumping up the bit-rate to see if it would correct the blockiness while panning/zooming. No dice...it's still got this strange blocky effect until you stop moving the camera, then it quickly clears up. Do you think it's just too many pixels to update and maintain a clear picture. For what it's worth, the same effect can be seen when viewing the camera from it's own web-interface.

 

[bp2008]

Yes, that is all it is. Too much is changing too rapidly. The encoder has strict limits on encoding time and bit rate, and in extreme circumstances those limits are not enough to keep the video looking clean.

If the camera can encode H.265, it may look better (assuming it can encode as high of a bit rate in H.265 mode as it can in H.264). Of course it'll use a whole lot more CPU time in Blue Iris too.

The reason you don't see this kind of blocky artifacting in high-motion scenes of professionally produced video (movies & television) is that they can encode obscenely high bit rates straight off the camera, and then when producing lower bit rate copies (e.g. Netflix) they can temporarily allocate high bit rates to busy scenes and let the encoder spend all the time it wants to make it look good.

 

[Tuckerdude]

yeah...that's what I thought too. I've done a far bit of encoding in my time, so I get the concept. I DID try h265, but it was not any better I'm afraid. This is going to become an issue sooner than we might think as I believe that the itch to go to 4K will necessitate some kind of solution.

 

[bp2008]

Yeah, I don't think h.265 hardware encoders are very well optimized yet.

What is the max bit rate on that thing anyway?

I've got an early-model Dahua 4K fixed camera that can barely achieve 6 Mbps with H.264, and it has noticeable artifacts even being stationary like it is. I have yet to meet an 8 megapixel camera that can output any higher bit rate than a 2 megapixel camera, so the image quality definitely suffers.

 

[Tuckerdude]

The max bitrate on this camera is crazy-high at 16,384 Kbps. The side effect of bumping it up to that rate is that all input to the camera has about a two second delay. Meaning, if you choose to pan or zoom, there is a delay between when you click the control and seeing the camera actually move in the window. So not only does it not make a difference in "blocki-ness", but the delay makes it it even worse to control.

 

[Tuckerdude]

One more thing....If you want to see a DAMN good 4K bullet camera that has nice motion and great picture, check these out from Nelly's

NSC-208-BT 4K (8MP) Ultra HD Outdoor IP Bullet Security Camera 4mm - Nelly's Security

I really like them and have bought about 10 so far! They are SUPER SHARP and display smooth motion!

 

[bp2008]

Ah, may be an underpowered chipset in the camera. One of my ptzs has that problem. Too high of bit rate or frame rate and it gains an unpredictable delay in answering http requests which control ptz actions.