The clarity and resolution at night without any vehicle lights shining at the camera, is good, detail can be clearly seen. The moment a vehicle light comes into the lens area, the video and the recording, pixelates and washes out. Is there a way to correct or compensate for this? This video demonstrates.
Did that result in an accident? Certainly was a near miss if not.
Unfortunately you’re dealing with a few things there that you really can’t control:
The starlight sensor in the camera takes time to adjust for changing light conditions. When it is dark like that, it is overexposing the image, so bright lights are going to throw it off until it adjusts, which takes 3-5 seconds of constant light, not flashing.
Flashing LED emergency lights are particularly problematic for all cameras especially when they’re in a high exposure mode.
These cams use very high compression on the video. Changing lighting, motion, and flashing all react poorly to compression.
Night mode (black and white) might handle it a bit better but obviously you lose the color detail. You could also try moving the cam a bit so more of the street lights at the intersection are in view, that might help it drop its exposure level a bit (even at the start of the vid, the image seems overexposed to me).
When I tested the v3, I found its compression to have much more pixilation/ghosting than the OGs and Panv3, and ended up returning it. Now that I have a v4, I’ve found that one has the least amount of compression artifacts in low light (even though it has higher compression overall), though I don’t currently have any recordings of emergency lights going by to look at how it handled them. But you may want to give the v4 a try.
You can see some comparisons that I posted here (night in the first post, day in one further down). But they don’t show motion or flashing lights, just a comparison of the image quality between OG and v4. For reference, I personally found the OG quality to be a bit better than the v3 especially at night. The v4 seems to handle motion at night better than both the OG and v3 did.
I have one neighbors that frequently turns around near my mailbox at night. His headlights will shine on one of my windows where I have a v3 inside of a double pane window. You will notice the pixelation, wash out and even the reflection of my v3 when the headlights shine on my window.
Yeah you’ve got a combo of window reflection and compression artifacts (can pretty clearly see the difference between the two). None of these ultra high compression cams are going to handle that “light wash” well, but at least at night, I’ve found the v4 seems to be the best of all the ones I’ve tried.
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V4 is usually not to bad unless the car turns tight and comes straight at the cam.
I will swamp my v3 with my v4 and we shall see. Thanks everyone for the quick inputs.
Obviously don’t expect miracles, I find it is an improvement but bright lights will always be an issue.
Also I looked at your original image again, is it looking out through glass? I think the status light is reflecting (might want to turn that off), but that will also worsen the bright light issue.
And make sure the Spotlight setting is not set to Auto ( I learned the hard way) that it is set to Auto by default . 