I have several cameras including v3 and floodlight cams for years and have never been impressed with the quality detail of the video compression artifact algorithm.
I know this has been discussed before but I’m still not happy with the results.
I just had two incidents where the police needed footage from my floodlight camera v2 in 2K resolution and I really saw how bad the quality is. The first incident where people walking were blurry was understandable because it was low light but the second incident occurred during daylight. People in the video could not be recognized, licence plates 20 feet away couldn’t be read, very disappointing.
I have the same results with cameras that have excellent wifi, so that is not an issue. The cameras face away from the sun and have weather protection, not an issue.
It’s all about their image compression. I wish they could improve that as I am heavily invested in the system. I am looking for alternatives going forward.
You might have poor WiFi signal or interference in your house causing your cameras to reduce resolution. Here is a sample picture where I can read license plates 20 feet away with my Cam v3 aimed through a double pane window.
They use very heavy compression. Stuff that is moving is obviously most affected, so the license plate on a moving car is going to be unreadable in most cases. However I’ve found faces of people walking to be very clear on my OG, v4, and Panv3. Does the floodlight cam use a fisheye lens? That could be factoring in some as well. My OG Telephoto is also good at getting license plates as long as the car isn’t going too fast, because it has optical zoom and is focused on a fairly small area.
But regardless, the very heavy compression (over 99.9% when I calculated it out) is going to limit quality no matter what. There is a wishlist topic to allow the SD card to record with less compression, but it hasn’t gained any traction.
There are other brands that let you increase the bitrate higher than the approx 1Mbit/sec that Wyze uses. Then of course there is the option of hard wired/closed circuit cams with an NVR, which is going to be the most flexible and highest quality.
I guess long story short, if your cams are staying in HD and you’re not using web view to view the video, you’re seeing the limits of these cams. If you pull the SD card and put in a PC, it is a bit clearer than recording on your phone, but not a ton.
Another thing that I’ve found is that when comparing a paused video in the app vs. a still frame grabbed with the “take picture” button - the picture is significantly clearer. So that’s something to keep in mind if trying to get the clearest picture of a face or plate.
Here’s what mine looks like along with the device settings. The wifi should be fine with two of the three bars but why is my quality so bad compared to the other examples?
Looks ok to me - keep in mind your camera has a fisheye lens, and most examples posted here are from the regular cams that don’t have that.
But if you want to confirm it is full resolution, use the “take picture” feature then confirm that the picture saved to your device shows the proper resolution in the properties.
That doesn’t look like 360P to me though, so I think it is how it is supposed to be.
