Need to upgrade - Assurance/Colorvu/Darkfighter?

[18032190]

I currently have 2 of the 4MP Assurance cams and want to upgrade for better night performance.

Was initially happy with the assurance features but after a while since my street is pretty quiet most of the time, I found that using intrusion detection and line crossing actually does better especially in the far distance as the assurance would not trip humans and vehicles 70ft or more out.

So now that I need to upgrade, I was thinking 8mp assurance since they dont have 8MP colorvu out yet in turret form or maybe just wait, or standard darkfighter in an 8MP.

Reason for the 8MP is that I have a lot of distance to cover and dont want to litter the house with too many cams. I have a nice Darkfighter 25X PTZ hidden under rthe soffit right in the center of my house but gave up programming it a long time ago, was too comsuming, so know I use the 2 stationary cams and when they trip I can do a quick look, and if its a car thats parked, I can do a PTZ joystick manual look if need be

 

[wittaj]

First, don't chase megapixels as they need WAY MORE light at night than other MP. An 8MP needs 4 times the light light of a 2MP. In most instances a 2MP at night will kick the butt all night long of an 8MP. The current king of MP to sensor ratio are cameras with 4MP on a 1/1.8" sensor.

It is simple - do not buy a 4MP camera that is anything other than a 1/1.8" sensor. Do not buy a 2MP camera that is anything other than a 1/2.8" sensor. Do not buy into the 4K hype. Soon we will hopefully see some larger sensors that can truly carry an 8MP on it, but we are not quite there yet.

I repeat, do not chase 4k - at night the 1080 (2MP) cams will be your better bet. Just ask my neighbors with their 4k cameras that didn't provide the money shot to get their stolen belongings back, yet my older 2MP camera did capture the money shot that ID'd the thief for the police to find and make an arrest and fortunately still had all the stolen stuff...If you have a lot of light, and I mean a lot of light, then maybe 4k, but most of us do not have enough light for 4K.

Also, do not be sold by some trademarked night color vision that is a marketing ploy in a lot of ways lol. It is simply what a manufacturer wants to claim for low-light performance, but there are so many games that can be played even with the how they report the Lux numbers. They will claim a low lux of 0.001 for example, but then that is with a wide open iris and a shutter at 1/3 second and an f1.0 - as soon as you have motion in it, it will be crap. You need a shutter of at minimum 1/60 second to reduce a lot of blur from someone walking.

You were looking initially at the ColorVu and check out this video at midnight. You see this and it looks like daytime and be like WOW I want that camera. But any motion in the frame and it is crap and will be a ghost blur. You notice they do not show anything with motion. I can make all my cameras look like this at midnight with no other light, but we want good motion video, not still images video. They are very nice cameras with enough light at night - so do you have enough light at night? All cameras, regardless of what they are called, need light - either white light or infrared. Simple physics.


It is these games that the consumer grade cameras of the world do to their camera to make it look good at night - but then a person walking by is a blur and people simply say well the camera isn't good at night. If you have the ability to change the settings, you can make it work. Just remember that every increase in shutter speed needs more light. So I can set mine to 1/250 second and eliminate blur at night, but then all that is visible is a 5 foot diameter around the camera IF I have enough light.

How are these cameras being recorded? NVR or Blue Iris? Have you thought about using a fixed cam as a spotter cam to simply turn the PTZ to look at an area?

Look for the standard camera posts from @SouthernYankee and @sebastiantombs with more details and recommended cameras.

 

[18032190]

Thank you very much for the info, I have heard that chasing MP before and I agree with you. I see the difference in quality overall in my 2MP Speed Dome PTZ 25x optical. I just figured that in my other 2 stationary cams, as I was covering more area, that the 8MP would allow me to have a better digital zoom close up if need be versus the 2MP.

I am using an NVR, Hikvision 4k 8 channel, not sure the model number

And I have played with the shutters before, even on my standard non-dark fighter I can get a good night shot, but you are right, when a car or someone walks by, its a ghosting image and that wont do me any good.

I guess I thought being in an urban environment (Southern CA), me having a couple of spotlights and a streetlight in front of the house would be good enough for a night cam, but besides me and another neighbor across the street lighting our houses up, no one else does and at far distances, its tough to see. And its pretty quiet for the most part, but when the door pullers come around, they usually park at the top of the street where its darkest and walk around, and thats like at least 100-150ft away minimum.

My PTZ is great, but even at night because I have to pump up the WDR so high, the image is super noisy. Issue with the PTZ is that its a pain to try and program, so I gave up and just use it manually. I did try to use a stationary cam to trigger it to move, but it worked once, and it seems to make the WDR turn off at that point which makes the picture too dark. And my basic 4k only has 1 intrusion or line crossing and I am already using it in the street so without more events I cant trigger the PTZ thus the need for something newer and more powerful.

I have attached screenshots night and day.......

 

[wittaj]

Wow you are fortunate to have that much light there at night!

So the problem with any of these cameras are the sensors are so small, so you cannot digital zoom much before it is a mess, even with 8MP at a distance. Up close it might give you a better digital zoom, but better to go with a varifocal that you can optically zoom into the area you want to cover than rely on a digital zoom.

Try taking WDR off and try to get it dialed in with other settings first. WDR will add noise if too high and you should only use WDR after you have exhausted other ways to get the quality you are looking for. Those cameras should be giving a better image than I am seeing.

Take it off auto settings at night as the auto settings in most situations for shutter will produce a great picture, but motion is complete crap with blurring and ghosting.

Go into shutter settings and change to manual priority and start with custom shutter as ms and change to 0-8.3ms and gain 0-50 for starters. Auto could have a shutter speed of 100ms or more and gain up at 100 which will contribute to significant ghosting.

Now what you will notice that happens immediately is 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 and blur 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 30ms as that tends to be the point where blur starts to occur.

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), 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.

Give these a try and see if you can bring new life to these and especially the PTZ

 

[18032190]

Thank you for the advice and settings, I will play with it tonight and see what I can do and post results tomorrow. Its like when I bought these cams, they were awesome, but little by little I pumped up the WDR on all cams to bring in that extra detail and now they are all super noisy and dont look great at all anymore. Especially the PTZ, it looks awesome in the daytime, but not so much at night. I was wrong also, I went out and measured and that dark spot up the street is more like 200-300ft out so maybe im expecting too much from the stationary cams

Thanks again!

 

[wittaj]

Thank you for the advice and settings, I will play with it tonight and see what I can do and post results tomorrow. Its like when I bought these cams, they were awesome, but little by little I pumped up the WDR on all cams to bring in that extra detail and now they are all super noisy and dont look great at all anymore. Especially the PTZ, it looks awesome in the daytime, but not so much at night. I was wrong also, I went out and measured and that dark spot up the street is more like 200-300ft out so maybe im expecting too much from the stationary cams

Thanks again!

Yeah, at 200-300ft out a digital zoom would be useless and impossible being dark. You would need the optical power of the PTZ at that point or a fixed cam with enough optical zoom like the Dahua 5241-Z12E but even that would be pushing it.

A little WDR is ok and sometimes you cannot overcome it with settings and need to use it, but too much and the pic gets grainy or washed out or appears out of focus depending on the algorithm is set up.