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how clear are the images with the cl-69sh, can you make out licence plates at night?
You have gone from one extreme to another extreme. Buy a device to provide license plate recognition will require a very high end camera, and lots of "design" issues have to be resolved to make it effective.
License Plate recognition is pretty much out of range for most DIY except those that have high levels of electronics experience.
In my opinion, and only my opinion when it comes to cameras is this.
Cameras have many many circuits that make up the whole camera.
As they start to make the camera cheaper they start removing circuits as the price goes down. At the bottom end it is not really a camera at all.
OK! I take that back. It is a "camera", but when it is missing so many circuits then it is not very useful.
I would call all cameras a "Cadillac, or a Lincoln town car". You have all of the bells, and whistles, and all of your luxury items are there.
If you buy a cheap car, then we can go from 8 cylinders to 4, we can give up computer controlled ride control, extra cushion in the seats, motorized seat position, cruise control, dual aircondition controls, and premium leather seating.
At the bottom of the food chain, what is the worse car that you can think of? This is the category of some "low end cameras".
There are two cylinder cars on the market, but I would not want to use that in the driving conditions that I am faced with on a daily basis.
I specialize in providing "low end installs". I would really suggest that you look at your decision process a little different. I do realize that you are in a budget.
You actually have to have a plan. What will this system do? Based on this plan we can decide where the camera will be located.
The one problem that I find with resolving DIY installs is that people automatically place cameras at the four corners of thier house. This is a major malfunction when it comes to cheap cameras.
Where the camera is mounted, and the distance to where the viewing area has to be measured. Now double that distance, and use that as your night time IR distance.
Most cheap cameras will state that they use 30 foot IR. In my opinion it will only be effective at 15 feet.
Think of a flashlight. Yes it shoots out 30 feet, but if you have a friend stand at 30 feet from the flashlight you cannot really make out your friend. If they stand 3 feet away they are then "washed out" because of the bright light. If they stand 15 feet from you then things balance in the proper light.
Here is why most cameras fail when the sun goes down. A camera cannot duplicate the sun with IR. The sun is so powerful that it shines down on a subject, and there is light that bounces from the ground up, and the light bounces from the side of objects such as tall buildings, mountains, ect.
The better the picture that you need the more you need to think like a stage manager designing a play. Have you seen how many lights they have lighting up a stage??
Think of down lighting, and side lighting. This is what you need to plan on.
It the distance from you house to your driveway is 30 feet, then you will want a 60 foot IR camera.
If you need a better picture at night then you will want to sidelight the area as well, and to take it to the next level then you will want to down light the area as well.
The expensive way to do this is to light up the area like a shopping mall parking lot. Even that is not enough as those kind of lights do not have the full color range to be effective for "photography".
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I have looked at the specs for those cameras that you have selected. Nothing appears to stand out that would give you major headaches.
You may have chose wisely, or they may be the wrong selection. They may be great cameras, but in the wrong environment they can be out of their design specs.
I would say order one camera, and then power it up, and hook it up to a TV, and try it at the various locations around your house. If you are happy with it then you can order more. If for some reason it did not match your expectations then you can order something different.
Here is another failure that I find in the DIY market.
Most video surveillance in a box "kits" come with wide angle lenses. This eliminates camera settings to make it easy for the DIY.
Wide angle cameras (2.8mm, 3mm, or 4mm) have distance distortion. You will not get facial recognition from a wide angle camera unless he/she is standing 5 feet from the camera. With IR at night they will be washed out!
Wide angle cameras are designed to pull in extra peripheral vision from the left, and the right. I would try to get you to imagine that you are bowing the video in an outward curve. You pull in the sides, but the front goes deeper. Someone standing in the camera will appear farther away in the video. The farther away they are the smaller the face will be, and the less pixals you will have to provide clarity.
For facial shots you need it to look like the news, all head and shoulders. Facial Recognition needs about 25% of the viewing area. This is where lens selection can make, or break Video Surveillance.
6mm is the starting point where you do not have the distance distortion, but you lose peripheral vision. Now we have the "teeter totter" effect in our decision process for a camera.
I would suggest a vari focal lens camera. This way as your needs change, or if you have an unexpected need to video "tape" something, then you do not have to go, and buy another camera! All you have to do is change the lens setting, and you are good to go. When you are done with your emergency, then you can set it back the way it was, and point it back in it original direction. This makes your system flexible. You may spend more up front, but you save a lot down the road!!
My mail box is 30 feet in front of my house. I need something in the 25mm range to get a good shot of someone at my mailbox. A wide angle camera will not do it. Night time video requires some tricks to make it happen.
License plate recognition will require a $2000.00 camera to be effective.
During the day you can get away with a none LPR camera, but then you loose a few plates here, and there. What is an exceptable failure percentage?? Based on that I would select cameras to match the exceptable failure rate. Night time LPR will require some serious wide dynamic circuitry that most entry level cameras do not have.
Now lets look at your house. If the camera says 30 foot IR, then look at the area that you want to watch. Mount the camera at 15 feet from there. As you can see you cannot put that camera all the way to the end of your house (depending on which side you driveway is on, and which corner we are talking about).
I hope this makes your install easier for you to design!
Now that we have modified the installation of the camera to fit the IR range, or we upped the IR distance to match the location of the camera, and the viewing area, we can work on lens selection.
The cheapest way is to use two cameras. A wide angle will show you the whole yard, but will not give you facial.
Get a cheap camera that has a high lens number. Pick a travel path that the crook will walk on, and point the camera there. You will only get a facial shot when the crook walks in front of this camera. Pointing it at a car is a sure bet, as they will probably go there.
What do you think?
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