Need a high definition night time camera?

[Kinhell]

I want to setup a POE camera with night time colour so that we can see the beautiful foxes that come into our garden late
in the evening. The garden is 12m wide by 30m so needs good IR and maybe a 6mm lens (need some guidance on that). Any recommendations for a camera with a great picture? It'll be connected to our hikvision box.

 

[cymruchris]

If you want night time colour - you'll need a source of lighting. If the garden is pitch black at night you won't get a colour image. Infra red won't matter if you only want colour images.

So before anyone makes recommendations - do you have, or will you fit additional lighting? (It doesn't need to be 'daylight level' lighting - but an even soft glow over the garden would give the best results).

If you don't have lighting, and/or don't want to fit any, you'll need an IR camera which will deliver black and white images.

There are cameras that have a built in LED light and IR in a combined unit - but you might find the lighting poor if you're thinking to get TV quality images of foxes running through the garden....

So a bit more on what you might be wanting to achieve will help us work out the best option for you.

 

[Kinhell]

I had thought of the ColorVu cameras as a friend has one and it gives good night time colour images. They include their own source of light and so hadn't thought of including any additional lighting. I was just looking for a recommendation of a good camera which was self lit and would give the best images for that size garden.

 

[Dan]

Hi @Kinhell

You might want to consider the latest Hybrid Light cameras which feature both IR LEDs (for B& W images) and a White Light LED (for colour images), these models give you more choices because you can set them at night to be always colour/white light, always B&W/IR light, or smart mode where the camera will switch into Colour mode when a smart event (line crossing, intrusion, etc...) is triggered.

See this other forum user's review of the Hybrid Light technology:

Pro Series with Smart Hybrid Light - Review and First impressions

The new ColorVu with Smart Hybrid light cameras are now available. As previous posts have detailed these are a hardware enhancement to the existing second generation ColorVu with AcuSense cameras, using the same G5 firmware. First generation ColorVu and AcuSense cameras...

www.use-ip.co.uk

 

[cymruchris]

Just to add to the above - do remember foxes are quite small - and if you use a very wide lens (such as the 2.8mm which is often recommended for general security) - the fox at night won't be a prominent part of the image captured. If you're aware that the animals congregate in a particular area, or there's a specific path they always follow, it might be worthwhile getting a longer focal length lens and honing in on that particular area, rather than having a very wide view with a little orange dot wandering through a large expanse of garden. Depending on budget of course - you could have one wide view camera to monitor the whole area, and one longer focal length camera to see more close-up action.

You could also have a look at Hikvisions Tandemvu range - where there's a fixed lens camera combined with a pan tilt zoom - so you get wide area general images, but could also track the foxes around the garden, zooming in and watching what they're upto. I don't have experience with tandemvu (plenty of experience with PTZ - and they are brilliant for getting in close to wildlife) - but they certainly look interesting - they have white light colorvu/infra red options - something like the entry level DS-2SE4C415MWG-E which seems to come in at about £400ish depending on where you buy it. There may be others with experience of the Tandemvu that could offer a little more insight,

​