Lorex LNB8963 varifocal help.

[oknoob]

Hi all, great forum. And first post here, I have all lorex system is the Costco 8 4k detterent cameras and NVR N84148-Z. And 8 E891AB cameras. Also I order the LNB8963B varifocal.
Now they all looks great during the day but at nigth no that good. The varifocal zoom is good but bad image. And for the money I was expecting a better quality image. Play a little bit with the image.sttings but still no happy with it
I may return the varifocal. Still learning. Any comment or suggestions for better image welcome. All cables are cat6 exterior grade. lorex.

 

[mat200]

Hi all, great forum. And first post here, I have all lorex system is the Costco 8 4k detterent cameras and NVR N84148-Z. And 8 E891AB cameras. Also I order the LNB8963B varifocal.
Now they all looks great during the day but at nigth no that good. The varifocal zoom is good but bad image. And for the money I was expecting a better quality image. Play a little bit with the image.sttings but still no happy with it
I may return the varifocal. Still learning. Any comment or suggestions for better image welcome. All cables are cat6 exterior grade. lorex.

Welcome @oknoob

Check the specs of the cameras.

In particular with those models - look for the sensor size and lux ratings that Lorex publishes.

Please share that info here.

 

[gawettla]

This might be a little too late to help, but it is some information that others might find useful.

I recently got a LOREX system with the

LNB8963B
and
LNE8964AB

cameras.
The cameras look good during the daytime but they are quite bad at night.

I contacted LOREX for help, but they are useless. I am not sure that their support people know anything about their NVR's or cameras.

Anyway, I found that if you connect to the NVR through a browser, you get some additional functionality. I think IE is the only browser that really works. You do need to install a plugin to see video.

I have 5 cameras connected and the browser interface looks like:



The important setting to look at is SETUP, It will show all of the cameras and a WEB link to the camera



Logging into the camera looks like (I cannot get the camera image working in this browser window)


In the Profile Management, you can set the cameras to work with a day and a night setting, the camera switches itself based on a light level (I am guessing).
There are other options you can try too. I do not believe that these settings are available from the NVR. I use Day/Night.

Then in the Settings pane you can set the cameras up with day and night settings. This is where you can make the night time video better.
In the Night profile under Exposure, you can setting the slowest shutter speed of the camera (This will give you a better image)

I set the slowest shutter speed to be 1/120s


You might want to change the Backlight setting, for me the infrared lights in the camera were too bright. (You can turn them off in the IR Light setting. I left them in SmartIR mode. Which I presume comes on at night, and off in day.

For Backlight I set it to the HLC mode and moved the slider all the way to the right



I am still playing around with settings, but these are what I have at the moment.
I also bumped up the brightness a bit in the Picture settings.



I tried the gamma, but it did not really make any difference.

For me, these settings give a much better picture than the default. I think the big thing is getting the faster shutter speed. The camera does have to up the gain on the sensor, so there is more noise (grain) in the pictures.

Hopefully this helps, and perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can post better settings.

 

[pozzello]

While there may be some setting that can be tweaked, 4k (8mp) on a 1/2.5" cmos chip will not provide the best possible imaging at night. Varifocal lenses are often less efficient in light-gathering, everything else being the same.
so I would not expect great color images at night with these cams, despite the marketing hype...

 

[gawettla]

The system I have does not have the best cameras.
I was really disappointed with the nighttime video quality compared to my old 1080P DVR system.
So I have been trying to make the video quality as good as I can make it.
The settings I created above are acceptable.

 

[oknoob]

This might be a little too late to help, but it is some information that others might find useful.

I recently got a LOREX system with the

LNB8963B
and
LNE8964AB

cameras.
The cameras look good during the daytime but they are quite bad at night.

I contacted LOREX for help, but they are useless. I am not sure that their support people know anything about their NVR's or cameras.

Anyway, I found that if you connect to the NVR through a browser, you get some additional functionality. I think IE is the only browser that really works. You do need to install a plugin to see video.

I have 5 cameras connected and the browser interface looks like:

View attachment 63381

The important setting to look at is SETUP, It will show all of the cameras and a WEB link to the camera

View attachment 63382

Logging into the camera looks like (I cannot get the camera image working in this browser window)
View attachment 63383

In the Profile Management, you can set the cameras to work with a day and a night setting, the camera switches itself based on a light level (I am guessing).
There are other options you can try too. I do not believe that these settings are available from the NVR. I use Day/Night.

Then in the Settings pane you can set the cameras up with day and night settings. This is where you can make the night time video better.
In the Night profile under Exposure, you can setting the slowest shutter speed of the camera (This will give you a better image)

I set the slowest shutter speed to be 1/120s
View attachment 63385

You might want to change the Backlight setting, for me the infrared lights in the camera were too bright. (You can turn them off in the IR Light setting. I left them in SmartIR mode. Which I presume comes on at night, and off in day.

For Backlight I set it to the HLC mode and moved the slider all the way to the right

View attachment 63387

I am still playing around with settings, but these are what I have at the moment.
I also bumped up the brightness a bit in the Picture settings.

View attachment 63388

I tried the gamma, but it did not really make any difference.

For me, these settings give a much better picture than the default. I think the big thing is getting the faster shutter speed. The camera does have to up the gain on the sensor, so there is more noise (grain) in the pictures.

Hopefully this helps, and perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can post better settings.

Hi there great information. But I have to use a browser to connect the NVR? I will love to have a better quality nigth images.

 

[gawettla]

I found that using a browser to connect to the NVR and Camera provided the most available options for either.
The NVR is easy to connect to with the browser, just use the IP address to get to it. There is a way where you can use a URL, but I have forgotten what that URL is.

Once connected to the NVR with that browser, that one screen, shown above (Setup/Remote Device), will allow you to use your browser to connect to the camera. My camera's are connected to the NVR, if they were directly connected to the network, you could probably use an IP address to connect to them.

The only browser that I have found that works to show video when connected to the NVR or Camera is Internet explorer. I think really old versions of Chrome will work too.

But once connected to the camera with the browser you might see additional options that are not available from the NVR or the App.
For me I saw that I could change the shutter speed of the camera.
Before I made any changes to the camera, I saw that the camera had video that appeared to be blurry, probably from using a long shutter speed to get enough light. During the day with much more light, the shutter speed is higher, so the video is sharp.
Using the browser connected to the camera, I set the shutter speed to a slowest speed of 1/120s. I think the camera changes the gain to make the video look bright enough. You can change the brightness too, to make the video brighter.
The videos do have more noise in them but they are sharper.

Here is a snap that I resized to 50% of a scene that does have a couple of lights, you can see the noise in the image


Here is another with no lights, just the camera IR