ColorVu supplemental light off/on axis tests

As I mentioned in my review HikVision ColorVu cameras the supplemental light is really too bright to use in most cases but it is also lights up pretty much 180 by 180 degrees, which is also an issue if anything is close, so enabling it on a sky cam might be helpful to other near by cams.

Off axis test. 

It is raining with heavy clouds taking the moon out of the picture. The supplemental light settings at times (bottom time stamp) are:

• 8:47 change from 10 to 50
• 8:48 change from 50 to 100
• 8:49 change from 100 to 10

The ColurVu is mounted on the edge of the roof above the bird feeder.
The trees seen to light up on the edge of the view are about 50 feet from the cam on the left to about 33 feet center. The rain helps show some of the limitations of illumination from a camera instead of off axis. Camera is 2.8mm OEM of the Hikvision DS-2CD2347G1-LU I bought off Amazon. (video)

The Amcrest is mounted on the barn 43 feet from the ColorVu. Camera is a IP4M-1026 pushed to the max 1/3 second exposure and max gain. (video)

Dahua mounted about 4 feet behind the ColorVu on the soffit.  Camera is a IPC-HDW4631C-A also pushed to the max 1/3 second exposure and max gain. (video)

No light test.

Cameras are all in the same places as off axis test but ColorVu is angled down to roughly match the view form the Dahua. Also since there is more light I also tested motion with my black dog and me moving about. Moon would have been down to about last quarter but as the lack of any shadows shows it was pretty much obscured by clouds.

The test starts with the back door light on and a ladder in view of the Dahaua cam. The following happens at these times (the lower timestamp):

• at 8:43 the back door light is turned off and after a few seconds the ColorVu light comes on auto. Note black dog near far corner of house and the kind of purple tint the IR floods give the ColorVu video before the supplemental light kicks in.
• at 8:44 I turn the ColorVu light off. A few seconds after that I come out to get the ladder with a hat light on so I can see what I'm doing. Note the blur and low frame rate.
• at 8:46 I go back inside then come back out to walk carefully past with the hat light off
• at 8:47 I come back, ( I forgot my keys) with the hat light on cause it really is too dark to be walking safely with it off, then go off to feed.
• at 8:48 my white dog appears at the far corner of the house and wanders about for around 5 minutes. 
• at 8:53 I come back from feeding, turn my hat light off and wander carefully into the yard a bit to test for motion blur. Note I have to turn my hat light back on to see where I'm stepping part of the time.
• at 8:55 go back in triggering the back door light to come on.
• at 8:56 I come back out to do another motion test with the back door light on. Then plug a hole something dug next to the bird feeder.
• at 8:57 I go back in. Not the cats lurking on the walk way.

ColorVu video
Amcrest video
Dahua video

On axis test

Cameras are all in the same places as off axis test but ColorVu is angled down to roughly match the view form the Dahua. ColorVu camera has the supplemental light set to a fixed value of 10. For this view 10 seemed to be the max I could run the supplemental light at without causing glare that would diminish the view of the stars and distance trees.

22:21 to 22:25 White dog starts by the back door and then wanders the yard.

ColorVu video
Amcrest video
Dahua video

More IR options

I've posted before about the U06R 60 degree flood and the U06R2 90 degree floods.  They do a good job and only about ~$20. You still need a power supply though. Recently I came across some models from Tendelux that come with the power supply. Their model similar to the U06R2 is just ~$10 more. They also seem a bit less visible if that matters. I tried 3 models.

First let's start with the small spot, just $20, and some compare shots from an Amcrest IP4M-1026
Tendelux 80ft IR Illuminator | AI4 No Hot Spot Wide Angle Infrared Light for Security Camera (w/Power Adapter)

Shot with the illuminator off

Shot with the illuminator on. Far tree is about 35 feet from illuminator and 38 feet from the camera.

No bad for so a fill spot.

Next the U06R2 equiv
Tendelux 120ft IR Illuminator | BI8 Compact and Powerful 90° Infrared Light for CCTV Security Camera (w/Power Adapter)
I stuck one down in the picnic area to see what was passing through at night setting off the motion sensor. The camera, HikVision DS-2CD2032-I with 12mm lens, is about 50 feet away so its LEDs do not light much. It is mounted about 10 feet or so to the left of the picnic table.

A shot with the new flood off though there are other floods down the path in the distance.

After shot with the trees trimmed back a bit and the new flood on.

From another camera, a Hikvision DS-2CD2035-I, you can see the BI8 shines clear across the area some 60 feet bright enough for this cam to notice about 80 feet away.

The bright spots near the center of the pic are the eyes of raccoons at the water trough.

Then for a fill in I added another U06R2 I had not installed yet about 20 feet down on the fence to the right. The water trough is about 60 feet from the cam and about 40 feet from the U06R2.

U06R2 added

Notice it blows out the area near it more than the Tendelux does.

Lastly I was hoping the larger model would be good for the driveway but oddly not so much despite being billed as a 200 foot illuminator it is really more of a wider angle flood.
Tendelux 200ft Long Range IR Illuminator | BI18 90° LED Outdoor IR Flood Light for Security Camera (w/Power Adapter)
Here are compares from a Amcrest IP8M-2496 watching the south leg of the driveway.

Shot with no flood on.

With the "200 foot" Tendelux  on.

I swapped in a U06R and it looks much better. The distant tree is about 55 feet away.

Here are same shots from the Microseven M7B77-WPSV1 zoomed to the 22mm max. The building is about 300 feet away.

With the "200 foot" Tendelux  on.

With no flood.

With the U06R on.

When I swapped the "200 foot" Tendelux with the U06R I moved the "200 foot" Tendelux to point south. From the feeder cams (an Escam QD900 and Reolink RLC-422W). The Tendelux  could probably stand to be tilted up a bit.

From the Reolink pointed west and the "200 foot" Tendelux on, pointed south

From the Escam and the "200 foot" Tendelux on, pointed south south west

For compare. Note how far to the side it had lit up. Seems more than the stated 90 degrees.

From the Reolink pointed west and the "200 foot" Tendelux off, pointed south

From the Escam and the "200 foot" Tendelux off, pointed south south west

Note in the above Reolink shots the U06R was on. Here is a shot from the Reolink with it off for compare.

Viewing the night sky in color with an Amcrest IP4M-1026, IP4M-1055E, Dahua and HikVision ColorVu

So called Starlight cams seem to be becoming a thing so I thought I'd see what is possible with a camera I already had. You can look at my video Night sky Aug 10th 2019 and Night sky Aug 9th 2019 to see what I'm talking about here. Update: added two Amcrest IP4M-1055E cams to get a 180 view of the southern sky.  Here is a sample sunrise video from the south east cam Sunrise 12/5/2019 at 60X

With a few simple tests the Amcrest IP4M-1026 seemed to have the best low light video and the widest view. Mainly I wanted to try and capture some of the neighborhood's fireworks displays.  My first test with pretty much default settings came out OK with lightning.  It seemed to me it switched to night view earlier than it needed so I played with the options to get the video linked above.

I was surprised how much I could make out by just moonlight. It basically looked like what I would see looking out the window.

Below are the setting I used. You might be able to tweak this a bit further with experimenting but I'm happy with the results.

Though the fireworks capture was pretty much a bust as they were a lot more subdued this year and the few that did make it into were mostly blocked by the trees. Thinking now I'll add another cam to close to double the 118 degree view. Note I also did a test with a GW5747MIC 5MP Optional TWO-Way Audio PoE IP Camera 1.9mm 160° Wide Angle Night Vision Sony Starvis HD 1920P Security Mini Dome 5 Megapixel Built-In Microphone and Micro SD slot, Audio in/out Recording but the view was not only no wider but not as good in low light.

Added video without the Moon to show when it is too dark to even see out you can still see the horizon glow of Austin, the planets, at least 1 star, the bard and trees. Here are compare pics from my cameras that catch bits of the same view all from the same time, 8/21/2019 at 10PM local despite what some of the on screen timestamps say.

Screen grab from the posted video

Snapshot directly from Blue Iris

Snap shot from Reolink RLC-411WS (5MP Version) of west end of barn in sky pic

Snapshot from RLC-511W across south deck. Note plane from video and above Amcrest snapshot is just above far horizon. 

Snapshot from Reolink RLC-511 (non WiFi) of mid drive. Ton of IR down here so any bits not lit are hard to see.

From Hikvision DS-2CD2035-I overlooking the pool area (not currently up). Note when the moon is up you can usually see the horizon in this view.

Just in case you think the Amcrest is optimized for night, here is a snapshot from high noon.

Amcrest IP4M-1026 snapshot of sky with sun skirting top of frame.

Other cams I'm looking at for really low light

Note these are based on specs and or videos but I have not tried them yet. The 0.5 lux Amcrest above blows the 0.01Lux GW Security cam away in real life.

• NiteColorcameras from Nelly's Security They are 4MP Hikvision ColorVu cams at twice the price of the Amcrest (~$200) but are rated at 0.0014 lux min illumination! Videos look great.
• Lorex 4K Ultra HD Resolution 8MP Motorized Varifocal Outdoor 4x Optical Zoom IP Camera, 250ft Night Vision has some interesting videos but is rated at 1 lux min for color so I have doubts. Plus even at Black Friday price it is $270. Normally $470 and the reviews do not seem good.
• Dahua has cams rated down to 0.002 lux. Price wise their 0.009 lux 5 MP N51BI22 will set you back $140 to $200 while  their 0.002 lux A42BJA2 4MP Outdoor HD Analog Eyeball Camera will run you $100 to $140 BUT it is analog.

Updates

Amcrest

Unfortunately this is what the Amcrest IP4M-1055E cam looking SE looks like. At first I thought it was just the fog we've had the last couple days. Then maybe dirt on the lens but it turned out to be condensation on the inside of the cam. I was planning on swapping one with a Dahua IPC-HDW4631C-A  anyway for a compare. Dahua claims a rating of  0.06Lux/F1.6( Color,1/3s,30IRE) 0.4Lux/F1.6( Color,1/30s,30IRE). Sellers are claiming as low as 0.002.

Dahua

I've received a IPC-HFW4631H-ZSA Without Dahua logo 6MP IP Camera 2.7-13.5mm Motorized Varifocal Lens Optical Zoom I'll be testing soon. It is going for $109 on Newegg and $118 on Amazon.  I should note I see a lot of people posting that the Dahua international OEMs are knock offs. They are definitely a lot cheaper. The "English" OEM is $180 on Amazon and Dahua labeled version of this cam from B&H is $288. 
I must say I'm impressed so far. I mainly got it to see how the zoom and autofocus compared but the low light is damn impressive. You can clearly make out Orion in the Dahua shot below while the Amcrest used above can only see a few stars. Sirius is easy to make out in both and Rigel can be dimly seen in the Amcrest shot. Once you know it is there you can sort of make out Orion in the Amcrest but it is fairly clear in the Dahua shot. Note this is about at moon rise.

Orion constellation clearly visible above weather station

The same shot from the Amcrest IP4M-1026

Here at there is about a half moon high in the sky but some clouds have rolled in too.

In this Dahua shot you can see the moon is just a light in the sky though Sirius is still visible.

The same shot from the Amcrest IP4M-1055E looking SE. The moon looks more like a sphere though the ground objects are basically silhouettes.

The same shot from the Amcrest IP4M-1055E looking SW. You can see Sirius and barn roof can be made out a bit better.

It is an overcast day but here is a day compare.

Dahua shot of sun through the clouds and birds in flight

Almost the same shot from the Amcrest IP4M-1055E looking SW

On the flip side though if you are thinking of monitoring your yard in color at night you should look at this video of the Dahua being manually switched from color to night / IR mode to get a feel for if you have enough light to make that viable. I'll be adding more videos to the Dahua playlist.

HikVision ColorVu

It is just amazing. See this post for more.

Option C: ethernet over power lines

Original post 11/26/2018:
Been awhile since I tried one of these (and was very disappointed back then) but given the fun keeping cams down at the creek has been I thought I'd try it again. I bought one of the TP-Link AV1300 / AC1350 Gigabit Powerline Wi-Fi Adapter Kit | HomePlug AV2 Technology w/Beamforming | Plug, Pair, and Play (TL-WPA8630 KIT V2) because it had 3 ports plus WiFi AP built in. I should mention this is in a heavily wooded area outside my fenced in area. The cams are also close to the creek and I've had a couple cams near the creek stolen and wires cut. I was getting OK reliability  with a serious outdoor AP. A Unifi Outdoor+ with Ubiquiti Airmax Omni AMO-2G10 10Dbi 2.4 GHz Rocket Kit which could cover an acre without all the trees. I also tried putting an Unifi Outdoor+ down in the trees but since it was mounted in a tree the connection was flaky plus I was not happy with the idea vandals could get to a cable wired directly into my network and could fry some hardware. With the power line option they might destroy equipment outside the fence but not inside. So far it is working great which is kind of surprising on a couple levels. First from my previous disappointing experience. Then there is the whole AC noise issue that made me move from X10 to Z-wave a few years back. And I did not make it easy. The connections goes from the switch, to the inside adapter, to a 75 foot extension cord with neon power indicators in it (it was in place already), to and outside plug, through a Z-wave power switch, down a line about 55 feet to a breaker box, down another line to and outdoor outlet about 60 feet from the breaker and then lastly another 50 foot extension cord to a waterproof box where the receiver and POE injectors are. Despite that AP being in a box on the ground the WiFi seems to work pretty good too. This comes in real handy for adjusting the cams out there where getting between the tablet and the AP can be enough to lose a large percent of frames if not the connection.

Note I had bought a couple CelerCable CAT7 Slim Flat Ethernet Patch Cable with Snagless RJ45 Connectors, 50 Feet - Black with the thought they might be harder to see laying flat against the trucks of the trees but be warned these cables got hot running 12 volt POE through them. Using the Huacam HCP05 Passive PoE Injector/Splitters of course. The resistance in the cable was so bad the Amcrest IP4M-1026 would drop offline when the IR LEDs kicked on. I ended up routing the power through the old power cables till I receive replacement cables.

Update 7/25/2019:

The install down by the creek has been working well so I started thinking of doing similar out by the gate. This involved running about 300 feet of armored 120 VAC cable through the trees from the house breaker box and putting the home end on a different circuit, though on the same phase on the main. This would seem to be well beyond the specs but it appears to be working fine at an average of 230 kB/s. Note the price might be a bit daunting though. By the time you add in the cable, breaker, connectors, GFI outlet, boxes and such it came out to almost a $1/foot. With the Ethernet of Power being the first $100 of that. But it is handling 30fps of 720p just fine across the built in WiFi which is much better than the 1-3 I was getting before and should let me upgrade to cams with better data rates without worrying about how well their WiFi is.

So far the only downside seems to be that I'm not getting traffic status in the network monitor anymore since a Unifi port or AP is not the first contact point for the clients. Though I can get the traffic stats on the Unifi port the home end to plugged into.

Next I want to swap out that old Foscam FI9804P 720P Outdoor HD Wireless IP Camera with a Wyze cam with sensor hub in an outdoor case. And probably another wide angle cam to watch the street. I'll have to see how it handles the load.
The Wyze cam was a bust.
Ended up with a Reolink 5MP centered on the mailbox so I can zoom in on if needed.

Update: 1/20/2020 some gotchas.
I bought a third unit to use as a spare and had the bright idea of naming them so I more easily tell which was which. This seems to not do anything but cause the units to unpair.

TP-link device setting screen.

Also I plugged a Etekcity smart plug into the outlet that joined the 250 foot run from the gate to the 50 foot run to the house so I could control some low voltage lighting I added. This totally messed with the signal reducing it to the point I was averaging 1318 ms pings. Adding a surge protector between the line and the plug seems to have brought things back to the normal average for that line of 155 ms ping times. Note the original run to the creek area is averaging 7 ms pings.

Update 1/31/2020: The ping times started getting bad again. The issue appears to have been the Stanley power strip I plugged the indoor end into was causing noise on the line. Moving the indoor end back to the wall outlet got the ping times back to averaging under 70 ms. 

Review: Univivi U06R WideAngle Long Range 130 Feet 6pcs LED Array Lights IR Illuminator

Update 1/22/2017: below is my original posting on Facebook. Since then I've had 2 of the four appear to have gone out. It looks like the power supplies I had them on just could not give them enough power. The specs say a 2 amp supply but the 5 amp supplies I bought seems iffy to power a cam and the light though the 2 together ought to only draw about 3.5 amps max.

I bought a Univivi U06R WideAngle Long Range 130 Feet 6pcs LED Array Lights IR
for eval. Here is the Amcrest 2k deck cam
with some other cams in the distance helping light the yard.

Now with one of the old analog LBC6050  cams on the deck as an IR illuminator.

Now I replace that with the Univivi U06R. Not as wide angle as I'd like here but awesome for longer shots.

Here I have same analog cam stuck in the rocks.

I pointed the Univivi U06R still from the deck toward the driveway and the analog back toward the lower deck. It might more sense to line it up with the camera. I'll have do more tests but I like the way it lights up the south west gate.

Now this is what the Univivi U06R is made for. This is an Escam QD900 looking through the fence so there is a bit of glare back.

Now the same shot with a Univivi U06R setting below it. The old pool pump is about 40 feet away. The deer feeder and water trough about 70.

Update: Jan 6th 2019

Thought it might be time for an update with some more examples

These cameras are about 110 feet from the creek. 

I had a Univivi U06R about 25 feet down the path as added light You can see how it makes the trees glow but the water is almost lost in the black about 110 feet from the cams. If you look close you can see far bank sometime as in this shot from the Amcrest IP4M-1026.

In this shot from the max zoomed (22mm) Microseven, next to the Amcrest, is worse because of the glow from the trees from the all the IR.

Adding second Univivi U06R (see daylight pic above) aimed at the far bank improves things a lot.

For the Amcrest IP4M-1026

And the Microseven as well.

Even up the path you can see the diff in this Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I (12MM)  mounted 72 feet behind the above cams. With one Univivi U06R

And with the second installed.

Decided to adjust the second illuminator to shine more on the water and it made a big improvement.

It might seem all that diff in the stills so I posted a video to show how you can easily make out the waves in the water now.