Cam Outdoor features and quality

Cameras
1

Hey all,

There has been a rash of cars driving through our neighborhood at night doing bad things. I want to mount a camera on the tree by our street and capture the car (and license plate) of these bad people. I have a couple of questions:

  1. Does this camera have good enough quality to get a good, readable still capture of a license plate from, say, 30 feet away?
  2. I would only need it to capture motion at night, say from midnight to 6AM. Is this possible to set up that way?

Thanks!
Justin

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2

You won’t get any plate numbers with the cam at 30 feet or even 15 feet unless the car is sitting still and even that is a maybe. Are you talking about the battery powered WYZE Cam Outdoor or the wired V3 indoor/Outdoor?

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3

I was referring to the battery powered cam. Would the wired V3 indoor/outdoor cam provide what I’m looking for? These cars usually are driving pretty slowly…at a person’s walk pace.

4

The V3 has great color night vision with (Night Vision turned Off) and you can do continuous recording to a good SD card in the cam. I like the Samsung Pro Endurance 64GB cards formatted to FAT 32 but there are other good High Endurance cards. You may be able to get the type of car but I highly doubt you can get a plate number. The battery WCO would not be a good choice for what you want to do. I have 4 of them and they work great watching the yards around the sides of my house . The V3 is your best bet but you have to be able to run power to it. And yes I guess you could set it up with “Rules” to start and stop recording at certain times. I just leave V3 on continuous recording now 24/7. When the 64 GB card gets full it just writes over the oldest files. It last about 3-4 days before over write while recording in HD mode. How far away is the tree from your router?

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5

Here is a car at about 28 feet at night.

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6

Ahhh, ok I see what you mean. Thanks! Is that the V3?

Also, I may have misjudged how far away the camera will be to the street. It won’t be that far. Probably half the distance in the video, but still not sure it would be able to get a readable plate number.

7

Yes it is a V3 with night vision off. If you turn night vision on it would be in black and white.

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8

Hello, justin.feist.

Set up a camera, drive by and see what you can see.

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9

I just got a couple of the Wyze outdoor cameras. One bout 8 feet above the driveway dead center over the lane I pull my car out using. I have backed out a few times and got a recording the entire time while I backed the 50 feet to the street… I can barely read the front license plate on my car at all. Even in bright sunlight, clear day car barely moving. There are artifacts that cause something like vertical grey shadows. It doesn’t help that the event player n either phone or tablet (Android) is almost impossible to manipulate with any precision. At the very best, car about 10 feet away and pausing the playback just perfectly, I can barely make out three of the 8 digits (remember, I know what they should be), though I can see the rest. Any further away and it is a total waste of time.
I am not sure if trying a different player for the video would help. Perhaps frame by frame advance would help. In any case, I would not depend on these cameras for license plate IDs under anything other than perfect situations. Probably not even then.