HIKVISION PTZ features...DS-2DE4225IW-DE

[Brian Sadler]

Hi,

I have 2 of these PTZ cameras for our property and really like them. I'm very familiar with the operation, but the FOCUS has always confused me.
In the configuration settings, FOCUS has 3 modes, MANUAL and AUTO and SEMI-AUTO.
I've tried all these modes at one time or another and not really had a lot of success. It seems the FOCUS is most sensitive in the NIGHT setting presumably because the lens aperture is wide open.

My procedure has been at NIGHT to select MANUAL and adjust for best FOCUS, then save the PRESET. But as I switch between PRESETS, it seems to be still using some AUTO FOCUS.

Q1. For each of these modes I can set a MIN FOCUS DISTANCE. What exactly does that do ?
Q2. What is SEMI-AUTO ?
Q3. If I select MANUAL, does the camera store a FOCUS value, set by me, for each PRESET ?
Q4. If the answer to Q3 is YES, does it store a FOCUS value for both DAY and NIGHT or just one ?

 

[watchful_ip]

I know this was posted ages ago, but having recently gotten a new Hikvision PTZ myself, I've been looking at this too.

Firstly, min focus distance tells the camera not to try to focus on things nearer to it than what you set. So when it's focusing in and out, trying to get good focus on something, it will limit it's range according to what you set.

Secondly, I'm looking in to whether focus level is saved. I'm checking the internal camera database which is my case has lots of tables seeming to do with presets, but a table called ipdome_ptz_preset_new seems to save mine:

ipdome_ptz_preset_new( idx integer primary key, num        int, preset varchar(1440));[code]

[code]Alpha,0,0,0,0,:2:1:27968:-341:966983680:37187:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:Beta,0,0,0,0,:2:2:27298:-223:1035075584:24634:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:

Though all presets in one record (perhaps the other records are for different modes).

Alpha and Beta are 2 different presents. I changed the focus on one of them for a test, and 37187 above changed slightly. So for the moment I'm going to say yes focus level is saved. That could be wrong though - still to check a bit more on this.

 

[Brian Sadler]

Thanks for the reply. I really like this camera , although they are quite expensive. I wonder what your experiences are so far ?

I was asking about the focus because I also bought a Sunba PTZ camera and it seems to rely very heavily on the autofocus. It’s almost OK in daylight but it really screws up at night when the infrared is active. If you want to focus on a distant object behind a close up object, it will always fail. I have other issues with this camera, but not related to focusing.

So I was hoping on the HIKVISION PTZ camera that each of the PRESETS on the camera stored the PTZ settings, which it obviously does, but also the manual focus and then it could fine tune within a small range.

Regards,
Brian

 

[watchful_ip]

I don't have a DS-2DE4225IW-DE but rather a DS-2DF8C442IXS-AELW.

I'd say I'm happy overall, and it's a massive upgrade on my much older PTZ camera it replaced.

There are some issues though.

Smart tracking is mostly good, but for some reason having it enabled causes events that trigger it to record for an hour or more even though they've been told to stop recording/tracking after 60 seconds.

There's lots of things the camera can do, but often it very much depends on what mode the camera was booted in (VCA mode).

For some reason the Smart VCA Mode has different options if the camera is detected as overseas region than Chinese. Patching the cam to china region lets me smart capture both humans and vehicles at the same time, whereas overseas mode doesn't. I don't know why they made it like that.

In terms of focusing, my model does have a rapid focus calibration feature that lets you define points to pre focus on ahead of time the idea being the camera remembers it when it pans/zooms to the same area. That potentially would be useful.