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Mathew68

IP camera without red glowing LEDs?

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Are you looking for indoor or outdoor and what style? Bullet or dome? There are a few out there. You are looking for cameras with 940nm LEDS or higher. The red glow is usually from 800nm LEDS which causes issues with bugs being attracted to them on outdoor applications.

 

If you can be more specific in what you are looking for, I can recommend the right camera(s).

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There are cameras with no LEDs, but are day/night cameras, but you can add covert illuminators, is that what you looking for? You can also turn IR LED's off on some brands and use it that way. Also, there's a few cube cameras that use bright white light LEDs, you will see blinding white light rather than dim red LEDs.

 

If you want a more covert setup, check Raytec, they make some of their IR illuminators with 940nm LEDs that are much less visible than 850nm most cameras use, but you'll need maybe 2-3x the power to illuminate the same area. A good choice for a small location would be the Raytec RM50-AI-50 940nm, says lights to 40-59' depending on light angle (narrow gives you more range, wider gives you less range, typical 3-4mm wide angle camera would use the full width, so 40') but in real practice it may be half that number, figure under a grand though, good buy.

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I would like to place the camera in the front yard close to the street parallel facing to the street so I can capture license plates as cars drive by. Have had a few cases of vandalism in the past and I don't think a camera attached to the house would be able to capture the plate as the car drives by. I'm not trying to hide the camera but also don't want a red lights bringing attention to the camera.

 

ACTi D32 looks like it only has one big LED. Does that camera's LED have a red glow too?

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The leds are usually dim, to notice them you would have to be already looking at the camera. They aren't brite enough to catch the eye and draw attention to the camera in most cases in an outdoor environment. Its not like its a pitch black room, you probably have street lights or other ambient light around.

 

I know with the Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I, you really have to be looking directly at the camera and if you walk to the sides even a several feet to the left or right they aren't really visible. Someone driving by in a car would notice the camera during the day 'way' before they would notice the led's at night.

 

How close is the camera going to be to the street?

Edited by Guest

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There are a few locations I could put it. The camera would be a few yards/meters from the street (we don't have sidewalks in our neighborhood)

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At night, you would not see anything with the Hikvision ds-2cd2023-i with a 12mm lens or any lens, but during the day, yes. The problem is the IR LEDs are not as bright as car headlights, so you will see 2 lights coming down the street, could be 2 motorcycles, could be Ferrari, Hummer H2, all looks the same.

 

To say capture a plate up at 30-50' or so, I would get a Raytec RM100-30, it's what we use and works well for this purpose. If you want that to be covert, you would need the RM200-30 with 940nm. Not going to tell you the price, because if you have to ask... The RM100-30 does not glow that bright.

 

Also, some people like the Axtontech illuminators, a little cheaper. But try to get close to the specs of the RM100 or RM200 as I know that works well.

 

As for the D32, any camera with one LED vs. a ring of say 25 LEDs, is going to be way brighter and more visible. I'm doing a review on the Hikvision eyeball camera and it's one bright LED, light a red star. Also, the D32 has like a 4mm lens, not good for plate capture, we run about 30mm on our LPR camera for plates about 40' away. 12mm would maybe cover 20'.

 

We just had an incident at night and with a 3MP camera and a 6mm lens on a $1,600 camera, 15' away at most from the camera, 2 light fixtures with three 60W bulbs say within a few feet of the car, I spent at least an hour with Photoshop tweaking it to be able to give law enforcement a plate number and I bet if I sent you the photo, you would never guess the plate number. Not our intent but the LPR camera was down that day. And I was lucky because he stopped. The camera is set at 1/60th max and still not fast enough to stop motion blur.

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Is it best to aim for the back plate if possible? Then you aren't dealing with headlights or a missing front plate. Even in states that require front plates many people don't have them.

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