When will Wyze be releasing a 4K camera. There are others out there and the video quality is nice. I like the features Wyze has to offer, so would like 4K 360degree…
I don’t think they’ve announced anything, but I’d hate to see how much compression they have to use to keep them at the same bandwidth as the 1080P and 2.5K cams.
Wyze’s compression is so bad their 2k cams are not much better than 1080, So 4k just wouldn’t be worth it with the current wyze ecosystem.
I like my Reolink 4k cams
Honestly curious, what compression ratio do they use on the wireless 4k cams on 2.4ghz? How many megabits per second is the stream?
The wyze 2.5K are noticeably sharper and clearer, but during moderately fast motion the ghosting is about the same as the 1080P. Combined with the better clarity I think it does end up looking a bit better even during motion though. Not a massive difference obviously.
The v4 does have better night time clarity than my OGs and Panv3s even though it is a bit dimmer due to the higher resolution sensor.
Not sure on 2.4 GHz WiFi as I am using 5 GHz for the Reolink’s (Wyze is on 2.4 GHz)
On WiFi 6 Wireless Access Points (Mesh) covering over 4 acres.
In settings under “Stream” the Max Bitrate is 4096 kbps but looking at it now at night in the stats display it bouncing around 1400 kbps. Probably higher during daylight (color) with some activity. Will have to check tomorrow
Reolink does Not have to compress heavily due the fact it is the host so there is no “Bandwidth Budget” like Wyze or other cloud served cams.
I may set up RTSP and watch a cam through VLC player with stats window to see more information sometime…
4 megs for 4k is pretty heavy compression (especially if you’re seeing 1400 actual, which is not much more than wyze 1080P). I suppose if any of us want a decently low compression ratio then hardwired is probably the best bet.
Like I said 1400 at night in B&W with next to zero motion is Not going to hit the max bitrate of 4096.
Video compression is variable so it will not always be at the max bitrate.
Understood. Like I said, for 4K I would want a lot more than 4 mbits/sec, but even on 5ghz wifi that could start to add up quick (not to mention the load on the camera itself, at some point it would choke processing higher bitrates). I’m guessing all these cams do the compression in the video portion before it hits the data bus.
Wyze does need to realize that they can’t just keep compressing these higher and higher resolutions to a target 1Mbps.
I don’t believe I need a 4K cam. 2.5K is overkill for monitoring cams for me. If I lived on the beach, I might need high-res for the scenery.
I can see using higher res for photos/videos worth keeping. Last vacation I used 1K at 60fps. Looked a whole lot better than 30fps, especially for panning.
Now 4K for vacations would be nice, but the filesize would be heavier.
If you need better resolution use a better handheld camera. Phones can do 8K. I tried it once but remembered my TV is only 4K.
Just an opinion.
The main reason for the increased resolution is to be able to zoom in (digital) and maintain detail. An 8K cam with no compression (which would be insane bandwidth) you could probably read a license plate from 1/4 mile away.
I could see that. I just don’t have a need.
Maybe they can make a OG-TEL-4K, but with an adjustable zoom.
I think every camera model should have a “Pro” version with optical zoom, at the very least 3x. Not sure if you saw my “pipe dream” or not:
You can follow this wishlist to see any updates on a potential v5 camera. I know 360, and 4k are already listed as wishes/wants in there.
Did some poking around in settings and found the max bitrate can be raised from 4096 to 5120 kbps…
Not a big raise but 5120 kbps seems to be the highest bitrate under the current firmware.
Hi everyone
I like the Wyze cameras, but because they don’t have a 4K version. I bought another brand. The reason for wanting a 4K version is that the recorded content can be saved on the internal drive. It does not need to be delivered to my phone app with 4K detail until I request it, but if I needed to zoom into a portion of the image the camera will provide more detail then a lower resolution camera.
Remember that the phone does not need the 4K content. It can be the same detail that is delivered to the phone currently.
With the new 4K cameras, they use newer technology and better lenses, so the video images are more sensitive, brighter and can detect content with more detail. The camera internal software can do a better job.
Enjoy your new toy!
What bit rate are they saving to the SD card? Keep in mind uncompressed 4K would be over 1 terabyte per hour.
Resolution is only one factor. The wyze 1080P cams would have significantly higher quality and detail (especially when zooming in) if it wasn’t for the extremely high compression rate. I do wish they’d offer an option to save to the SD card using less compression than what is streamed to their servers and the phone, but it would still be fairly high compression.
What you mention about images being brighter and more sensitive is likely HDR, which is available on the 2.5K wyze cams also.
Unfortunately with any of these cams, simply looking at the resolution is not enough. Comparing multiple Wyze 1080P cams can have stark differences, as can comparing with other brands that are equal or even higher resolution, but lower quality images.
Hi dave27
Thanks for the feedback.
Lossless video compression is 10-20x smaller, lossy compression can be 100x smaller, but if you only save the motion detected or human detected video. Then all can be saved on an SD card. Even lossy 4K video is good as long as it is not edited multiple times. That is only where quality degrades.
Understood, the issue is Wyze likes to target their bitrate to around 1Mbit/second regardless of resolution it seems. With 4K that’s a massive amount of compression (heck even with 1080P it is a ton, well over 99%).
Most of us like continuous recording to SD card, so even if they finally give in and grant our wishes to save higher resolution to the SD card, it would still be a significantly larger amount requiring a larger card and faster write speeds (the high endurance cards typically write pretty slow).
I suspect if we see 4K with lower compression, it will have to be a more expensive camera, and so far that hasn’t been the direction they want to go.
Keep in mind for affordability Wyze targets single-stream 802.11n only. In order to accommodate multiple cameras on that network, they try to keep their throughput down.