Using the Wyze Cam OG Telephoto as a low-cost daytime LPC camera

[wtimothyholman]

I have been experimenting with the new Wyze OG Telephoto camera with 3X optical zoom, and I have learned that it can capture license plates on moving vehicles from a distance of about 40 feet, where the vehicles are traveling between 25 and 30 mph.

Here's the good:

(1) The camera costs only $29, and it's weatherproof. You will need to install a $10 SD card for continuous recording.
(2) Stationary plates can be viewed up to about 70 feet.
(3) Moving plates can only be viewed up to about 40 feet. The interesting thing is that it isn't motion blur that reduces the readability, but instead the lossy compression of the camera. Unfortunately, there's no way to adjust that.

The bad:

(1) Motion blur is terrible at night (not surprising), so capturing moving plates after sunset is out of the question. I plan to do more testing in the coming days to determine the viewing range of stationary plates at night.
(2) You need to pay Wyze for their Cam Plus service if you want recordings in the cloud, or vehicle detection. Otherwise you can get by with free motion alerts and the SD card to check plates after the fact.

Granted, this is only a partial solution for LPC, and only works over a limited distance, but it might be useful in some residential and business applications. Plus, it is ridiculously cheap, and very easy to set up as long as you have a smartphone and WiFi. I doubt that anyone on this forum would want to rely on a camera like this, but it might be useful in situations where cost and convenience overrule everything else.

Wyze Cam OG Telephoto LPC at 40 feet

 

[Mike A.]

Exactly right about the very high compression, poor low-light performance with motion, and limited ability to control much of anything. The Wyze V3 cams can look absolutely beautiful at night with a static image. But that breaks down badly with motion.

I did put one of mine up for a while as an overview/supplemental cam to my LPRs to capture vehicle color at night and it worked OK just for that I suppose.

Not sure about the OG yet but the V3s you can put the mini hacks on and then use RTSP for BI or whatever so you don't need to deal with service limitations. That also lets you use it wired with an Ethernet-to-USB adapter to avoid issues with their kind of crappy WiFi performance. Bunch of other issues with the Wyze regularly dropping off, etc., that likely also apply to the OG. But as you say they're cheap and easy so...

 

[wtimothyholman]

Not sure about the OG yet but the V3s you can put the mini hacks on and then use RTSP for BI or whatever so you don't need to deal with service limitations. That also lets you use it wired with an Ethernet-to-USB adapter to avoid issues with their kind of crappy WiFi performance. Bunch of other issues with the Wyze regularly dropping off, etc., that likely also apply to the OG. But as you say they're cheap and easy so...

There's no support for the OG with wz_mini_hacks yet, and it will probably be some time before any support appears (if ever). Wyze said they completely redesigned the internals of the OG to lower costs, so I expect a lot of reverse engineering will be needed.

But the thing is this: if you're willing to go to that kind of effort to turn the Wyze into a PoE camera, then you have the skill and motivation to install a Dahua PoE camera instead. My motivation is to find solutions that my non-technical neighbors can implement with minimal effort.

The Wyze Cam OG Telephoto isn't even close to perfect, but it at least has some potential use cases. Being able to record license plates from 40 feet away in the daytime is fairly impressive for a $29 camera.

 

[Mike A.]

Very true. Really not worth putting that much effort into. I got my V3s for like $10 with SD cards when Home Depot had a clearance so they were laying around not doing much anyway. Even then I spent way too much in time messing with them for minimal end return. If you can live with them as they come and accept them for what they are, they're OK for the money and about as good as any others at that level that you'll spend a lot more for.

 

[richardgohth]

I have been experimenting with the new Wyze OG Telephoto camera with 3X optical zoom, and I have learned that it can capture license plates on moving vehicles from a distance of about 40 feet, where the vehicles are traveling between 25 and 30 mph.

Here's the good:

(1) The camera costs only $29, and it's weatherproof. You will need to install a $10 SD card for continuous recording.
(2) Stationary plates can be viewed up to about 70 feet.
(3) Moving plates can only be viewed up to about 40 feet. The interesting thing is that it isn't motion blur that reduces the readability, but instead the lossy compression of the camera. Unfortunately, there's no way to adjust that.

The bad:

(1) Motion blur is terrible at night (not surprising), so capturing moving plates after sunset is out of the question. I plan to do more testing in the coming days to determine the viewing range of stationary plates at night.
(2) You need to pay Wyze for their Cam Plus service if you want recordings in the cloud, or vehicle detection. Otherwise you can get by with free motion alerts and the SD card to check plates after the fact.

Granted, this is only a partial solution for LPC, and only works over a limited distance, but it might be useful in some residential and business applications. Plus, it is ridiculously cheap, and very easy to set up as long as you have a smartphone and WiFi. I doubt that anyone on this forum would want to rely on a camera like this, but it might be useful in situations where cost and convenience overrule everything else.

Wyze Cam OG Telephoto LPC at 40 feet

Nice. Good for applications that are concerned with day time parking issues say. Does the camera have an rtsp streaming output?

 

[wtimothyholman]

Nice. Good for applications that are concerned with day time parking issues say. Does the camera have an rtsp streaming output?

Unfortunately, no RTSP support. Wyze has very little motivation to support it, as that would impact their revenue from their Cam Plus subscription service.

But I agree about the application to parking. I did some night time testing, and found that the camera can read a stationary plate up to 70 feet away, just as in the daytime. Interestingly it works best in color mode rather than night vision mode, due to IR glare. You can see the results in the attached image. The license plate is readable from a sidewalk 70 feet away from my front porch, illuminated only by a couple of streetlights.

 

[looktall]

Pretty shady looking characters around your neighbourhood though.

 

[wtimothyholman]

Pretty shady looking characters around your neighbourhood though.

Indeed. My wife constantly threatens to shoot that guy.