Thoughts on Hikvision ColorVu DS-2CD2T87G2-LSU/SL 8MP for Intersection - along with anpr camera

[RBurn]

Hello, I’m looking for a camera to augment my Lpr camera at night. I was looking at the DS-2CD2T87G2-LSU/SL 8MP...

What are some recommendations?

I do have a couple QCN8026B 4mp 3.6 lens, 1/3” cmos (rebranded dahua) laying around so I could try those but i'm looking for clear and in color at night.

My setup is on a corner lot pointing to an entrance that is two lanes, each lane is 11ft.
The Lpr is about 90ft from where the camera is focused for the license plates. I have it zoomed all the way in.
I put in a 12ft 3” steel pole 3.5ft in the ground with concrete.
The Lpr is about 9ft up but it is sloped down a bit from the street.
I checked the angles and distance and they fall within guidelines. Even though it says one lane per camera, i think my 22ft is working fine.
The Lpr (DeepinView IDS-2CD7A46G0/P-IZHSY 4MP) is taking fantastic shots at night of the license but of course no detail of vehicle.

 

[ludshed]

You can try night color, it’ll probably be acceptable on full moons if you have a varifocal lense zoomed in a ways. But I don’t see any other source of light from pics, so if I could, I would put a starlight+ and a night color. Worst case you have one with details and another with vehicle color.

 

[RBurn]

I’ve been reading many threads on here and I’m thinking that if I have the license reader then a good night picture of the vehicle is needed but really does not have to be in color.

I focused on hikvision for the Lpr and I’m happy with it and how the software works so I’d most likely stick with hikvision cameras but I guess if I stick with a onvif standard I could use any NVR. I still have a aging dahua branded 16 cam ip NVR that is functioning with 10 cameras with 4 pir sensors input to the NVR for areas near entrances. Around my house the cameras work well for house monitoring but will see vehicles in the street during the day but not really at night.

In the past I’ve provided neighbors with photos of vehicles and times but no license plates. It’s helped get some justice for stolen trailer and general yes something happened down the road so what shows on the cameras. I really didn’t want to start this endeavor but the spouse said go ahead and many neighbors are willing to kick in but I’m not really wanting the money but certainly want to help neighbors and law enforcement and it appears the cameras and cost has come down.

Along with this I’m looking at Hikvision DS-7716NI-I4/16P -16TB to replace the aging NVR.

Thanks and I did review the starlight+ series. I posted in the hikvision forum to see if any others have Lpr and augment with another hikvision camera they could share with me. I also read about IR illuminators which I could add up on the pole.

 

[wittaj]

It is impossible to determine color from B/W infrared images.

You should run one camera, even if the shutter is slower and motion is a blur in order to capture color.

Since you mentioned ColorVu, I wanted to point out that many people have come here after buying the Hikvision ColorVu series (or any full color type camera) expressing their disappointment in the picture quality of the camera because they were expecting magic. If you do not have ambient light outside or do not like the white LED lights on, you are better off with cameras that can see infrared. ColorVu type cameras cannot see infrared, so you can't add infrared later.

Here is link to a thread of many that shows the disappointment of many thinking a ColorVu camera was magic and could defy physics. Full Color type cameras are great if you have light, but will be horrible if you do not have enough light (as is any surveillance camera)

Initial review of the DS-2CD2347G2-L(U) ColorVu 2.0 IP camera.

There seems to be more posts started here with complaints about the Hik full color version at night than the Dahua 4K/X full color version. If you want a full color, the 4K/X is a better choice.

Or maybe the people that buy the Hikvision version are naive and think they are magic and the ones that buy the 4K/X are educated as to the proper placement for this type of camera LOL...

https://www.amazon.com/EmpireTech-Full-Color-Syarlight-Turret-IPC-Color4K-T/dp/B0BC18KVF7/ref=sr_1_3?imprToken=eNnu.Pmf5hsW5hcTVECAQg&linkCode=w61&m=A329YQ83EBQGJF&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&qid=1672832699&redirect=true&s=merchant-items&slotNum=0&sr=1-3

https://www.amazon.com/EmpireTech-Full-Color-Weatherproof-Detection-IPC-Color4K-X/dp/B099R9WG9M/ref=sr_1_18?imprToken=eNnu.Pmf5hsW5hcTVECAQg&linkCode=w61&m=A329YQ83EBQGJF&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&qid=1672832719&redirect=true&s=merchant-items&slotNum=0&sr=1-18&th=1

But with any full color type camera, if you do not have enough ambient light or do not want to use the built-in white LED, then getting a camera with infrared capabilities is the best bet.

 

[RBurn]

Wow, yes I’ve read much more and I’m not wanting the white light for certain or a 8mp.
So after reading I’m looking for a 2mp with ir with the largest sensor. Now on the hunt for that. I’ve begun to review different cameras.

Wittaj, if you were starting over at this point and wanted a NVR and assorted cameras would you pick all the same brand or a mixture? What is your wisdom (brand you would choose) based on your experience?

thanks for your help.

 

[wittaj]

If I could go back and start all over, I wouldn't have made all the mistakes that got me to this point LOL.

I started with big box store all-in-kits. Thought they were great. Then something happened and I realized how poor they really are.

I had DVR/NVRs for over 10 years. In addition to all the false triggers (this was prior to AI in cams and NVRs) and the difficulty in quickly pulling up video, the next biggest issue I had was compatibility with other brands. Sure ONVIF might work, but you might lose some functionality as well.

So when I was looking at replacing an existing NVR, once I realized that not all NVRs are created equal (the bandwidth it can process is a huge limiting factor), and once I priced out a good one, it was cheaper to buy a refurbished computer, POE switch and Blue Iris than an NVR.

BI has a 15 day trial, so I loaded it up on a laptop and realized within 30min that it was a far better experience than any experience I had with all the various NVRs I had in the past. The other benefit to it was better ability to use other camera brands (basically anything but the consumer grade cloud dependent cameras).

So now I have several different brands of cameras, each one selected for the strength it brings and to compliment my system.

I have 720P to 4K running in my system. I can tell you that the events we have had in my neighborhood, it has been the 2MP varifocals that have provided the best overall captures for the police to use. As good as the 4K cameras are, if the perp isn't within 15ish feet of the camera, a 2MP varifocal optically zoomed in to the distance the perp is at is a much better choice.

Here is a thread I put together demonstrating the value of focal length over MP.

The Importance of Focal Length over MP in camera selection

At the urging of several folks here, I created a thread to show the importance of focal length and how focal length can be more important than megapixels (MP). I mentioned some of this in the post regarding The Hookup’s latest video demonstrating different cameras, including one sold from a...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[RBurn]

i looked into BI like 5 years or so ago and I didn’t see where I could easily use a pci board etc in order to run in the alarm pirs into. I guess I can look at the latest version. I’m not adverse to a computer and BI but I’ll reread what it does with PIR. I have 4 expensive pirs for trigger points at entrances to the house as I to quickly learned the motion alerts were not the way to go so I ran additional wiring so I power the pirs from a central 12v box near the NVR location. This basically eliminated false motions.

 

[wittaj]

BI and camera technology has come a long way in 5 years, especially in regards to helping to eliminate false triggers.

If all you care about are human or vehicle alerts, it is hard to beat the capability of the camera AI now.

You would probably have to update your NVR to accept these newer features or switch to BI. Or keep your existing NVR and use it to feed the cameras and triggers into BI.

But if you want alerts on more things, BI has incorporated AI code that is being updated probably much quickly than in the cameras. You can train your model as well using your own images.

Who uses Dahua AI capable cameras? Reliable AI for triggering events? Pro's/con's?

It has come to my attention that certain Dahua cameras come with built in AI that distinguishes between human & cars. I was unaware of this. Well, always saw the AI word used in the reviews but never really thought about it because I thought it was a Dahua NVR integration only. I am currently...

ipcamtalk.com

I know folks here use PIR with BI.

Here is one such thread:

Trigger deepstack/blueiris object detection from PIR trigger mqtt

I have several PIR sensors around the garden that alert me through nodered (mqtt rf bridge). Is there a way to make the blue iris camera trigger the snapshots in the record tab from an mqtt message and/or nodered? Thanks

ipcamtalk.com

 

[camerafool]

I've been running a Hikvision iDS-2CD7A46G0/P-IZHSY with Blue Iris for six days. I've got it mounted 38 degrees offset to a section of straight road about 30 meters distant. Have mounted a generic "850nm 6 LEDs 130 Feet 60 Degree Wide Angle IR Illuminator for Night Vision" next to the camera. Camera's IR LEDs are set to manual 100%. Car speeds are slow at 20-30 mph. During the day camera does pretty well detecting and reading license plates. Still dialing in night time exposure, but is looking like 1/750 or 1/1000 is the sweet spot. My street has so little traffic that judging setting change improvement takes a full day.

The camera and current firmware (V5.7.80 build 220610) have a multitude of issues that I'm still itemizing for a future review. Biggest problem I'm fighting right now are dropped frames. To determine how many vehicles get missed I set up a Blue Iris window to continuous record and another to motion detect record. Quickly realized the stream recorded by Blue Iris has many seconds of dropped frames every one to four minutes (exporting the direct to disk Blue Iris recordings and using Davinci Resolve to find the drop outs). Dropped frame gaps are sometimes 30 seconds to a full minute. During the periods of dropped frames camera still detects vehicles and captures plate photos. Dropping frames seems more likely to happen during vehicle passage, during a 90 minute period 7 cars were detected, 3 of those cars don't appear in the continuous (30fps) recording. To rule out HDD problems I set up a third iteration of the camera window and recorded the stream continuously to a different HDD.

I'm open to any and all suggests on correcting the dropped frames issue.

*Edit 38 degrees HORIZONTAL offset AND 8 DEGREES TILT DOWN

 

[wittaj]

Is the camera going thru the router? If so that can be the cause of the dropped frames.

Also try running 15 FPS and see if that helps it. Some cameras struggle at 30 FPS.

 

[camerafool]

Camera's web interface can record 30fps h.264 direct to PC HDD with no dropouts, but I gave up and changed to 20 fps. At 20 fps Blue Iris recordings aren't dropping frames. 20 fps will give camera at least two good frames at speeds of 60 mph or six frames at my street's typical speeds.