I have a couple pan cams and now a more recent camera capable of “2k” and the images on all of them are horrible. I think Wyze needs to rethink how they compress or record data, because the images are large despite being low quality, and the streams suffer from bandwidth despite being low resolution. I’d rather have a video at 1/4 of the frame rate, if each frame was crisp.
I just want to give a couple examples below. One is from the Wyze camera in 2K mode, and the file size is 5 megabytes. The second photo is the exact same resolution (1440x2560) and is 0.5 megabytes. Tell me how you can call the resolution of each image the same. If you have to compress the image to blur, then don’t pretend the camera can support the listed resolution. Please Wyze, make the images not so horrible.
From what I’ve calculated, over 99% compression is applied. That’s the way cloud/internet cams work.
Note that they take very little space/bandwidth. The reason the image on your phone is 5 megs is because your phone is essentially taking a screenshot and there is a lot of wasted space, data that isn’t there that the phone just fills in. On my 1080P wyze cams, they use around 10 megabytes per minute of video. So a single still frame is probably around 5-10KB. If it were 5MB it would be very good quality. Streaming takes around 2-3 mbits/sec, if your wifi can’t handle that, that’s not the cam, that’s your wifi.
These cams are not intended for video production or photography, just for keeping an eye on things. It is rare that you’d be able to make out a license plate, and often even the writing on the side of a truck will be a blur.
There has been a feature request for quite some time to allow less compression on video stored to the SD card, you can go vote on that, but it doesn’t seem to have gained any traction.
Unfortunately, 1080P, 2K, 2.5K etc all becomes fairly moot when you apply so much compression.
Also keep in mind that lower frame rate would not necessarily allow crisper video. For stuff that isn’t moving, sure, cut the frame rate by 1/4 and lower the compression, it will look better, but for things that are moving, which is what most people are looking at on these cams, it would make it much worse.
Your last point is basically my point. Why would they even market high resolutions that these cameras clearly don’t operate with.
If I enlarge a 1 pixel image to 100x100 pixels, that doesn’t make the image 100quality, it’s 1 quality and blurry.
Firstly, they should report the actual resolution they’re recording at. Second, if they want to offer actual high resolution they should allow us to reduce the frame rate.
I would be happy to get 1 photo per minute if it meant I didn’t feel like I needed glasses when looking at the footage.
One more thing. To your point about it being a screenshot, the above image was taken when I selected “take photo” while still holding the phone in portrait orientation (when the visible image is tiny). So it wasn’t taking a screenshot, it’s generating an image of a very specific resolution.
Sorry for blowing this up, but I thought of a few more things to reply to:
“if your wifi can’t handle that, it’s not the camera”
The camera is located in a building with a 100 megabit upload connection and being viewed from a home with a 400 megabit download connection. Bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue.
“my 1080p wyze cams use 10 megabytes per minute”
Well then clearly they aren’t 1080p cameras. A 1080p youtube video is about 50 megabytes per minute and looks fantastic. A 720 video is smaller and still looks fantastic. I don’t get Wyze quality videos on youtube until I select 360p, so really their cameras are 360p.
“keep in mind that lowering the frame rate wouldn’t make it crisper”
It would allow them to use just as much bandwidth but increase the quality of the stream. Things in motion would look choppy, but at least they wouldn’t look like garbage.
They should just let the user choose:
use 360p if you want a blurry video of something moving around that you can’t tell what it is,
use 1080p if you want a crisp video with a low frame rate and some choppiness.
And if the user clicks “take photo” it should set the compression to minimal and just let me download the high quality image.
They should forget all about offering 2k when they clearly don’t offer anything remotely of the sort.
They are reporting the actual resolution. Resolution and compression aren’t the same thing. But yes, it can be very misleading to claim a camera is FHD or QHD then compress it so much that the image quality is nowhere close to what you’d expect. That’s marketing for you. But the image is actually the resolution they claim it is, even if detail is lost, so they aren’t lying per se. They aren’t enhancing a low resolution image, they’re doing the opposite, compressing a high resolution one.
As far as your phone is concerned, hitting that button is just taking a screen shot of the video stream. To truly take a frame out of the video, you’d have to put the SD card in your PC and use a video editor app to extract it.
In fact that is the best way to get the highest quality possible - rather than streaming and re-compressing, just take the file right off the SD card. Of course that’s not always practical, but the quality is slightly higher that way. There is another feature request to allow access to the SD card directly over the network which would make that a lot easier.
Your internet connection and your wifi are two different things. 2.4ghz wifi with a single stream (what these cameras use) is far lower available bandwidth than that.
Again, you’re confusing resolution and compression. An uncompressed 1080P video would be gigabytes per minute. Youtube is compressing them also (and also by a very substantial amount), just less than Wyze is.
Actually things in motion would be even more blurry. If you had a camera with really high shutter speed and took a single frame every second, yes, every image would be clear. Video recording doesn’t work like that, the frame rate is directly tied to the “shutter speed” in this case (obviously there is no shutter in these cameras but same idea). The more frames per second, the faster the “shutter speed” and the less motion blur.
The compression has already been done at that point. The data is not there for you to be able to download.
I’m not disagreeing that the resolution is misleading, but it also is not untrue. You just have to set your expectations for what a $25 video camera is going to do for you.
I’d encourage you to go vote on the various feature requests to reduce the compression and/or allow less compression on the SD card, etc, but personally I’m not holding my breath.
“they are reporting actual resolution”
What they are doing is stupid and they should stop it. They should stream in a lower resolution and compress less, so that the image doesn’t look so bad.
“you’d have to put the SD card in your PC…”
The SD card footage is just as potato.
“Your internet connection and your wifi are two different things.”
The bandwidth of my wifi is better than the bandwidth of my connection. My router can handle uploads of 574mbps on 2.4ghz, and the iphone I’m using to view videos is rated at more than 800mbps, the router is capable of delivering 5 gigabits. The wyze camera has plenty of room on wifi; also if Wyze would just pipe directly from the camera to my phone without going through their server then they could use tons of bandwidth.
“again you are confusing resolution with compression”
I’m intentionally confusing the two, because Wyze shouldn’t pretend that you can take a super high res image and high quality image and compress it 99% at that same resolution and have that not be garbage. If you find yourself needing to compress your image to kingdom come then compress it for a reduced resolution so I can have 4 clear pixels instead of 16 blurry ones.
“Actually things in motion would be even more blurry.”
No it wouldn’t, this is where you are getting confused. If the reason they are compressing the hell out of the video is to reduce the bandwidth, then they could just skip frames, compress them less, and use just as much bandwidth for higher quality images. If, as you say, the camera is truly 2k then we would be saving a lot of power by only processing and transmitting 1/10 the frames the camera is rated to record at. The camera wouldn’t smear 10 frames together, it would just not bother to send a bunch of frames if the bandwidth limitation meant the compression was super high. Ergo, motion would not be more blurry it would be less blurry, but also choppy. But hell, the wyze camera footage is already choppier than any other camera I’ve owned.
Don’t take this as criticism or justifying Wyze, just trying to help you understand what you’re up against.
I wouldn’t be against that. My 720P dash cam which records around 100MB per minute has far better quality and clarity and I can easily read license plates even when moving. However Wyze is concerned with bandwidth into the cloud, they pay for every byte that gets uploaded and downloaded (Amazon uses usage based billing). So the end result would be the same quality effectively since they will make it end up being the same amount of data. Lower resolution and lower compression would basically balance out. Certain things might look a bit better (close up stuff) other things would be a bit worse, but they’d all generally be around the same. The real solution here is to allow lower compression to the SD card, then compress it further and upload it to the cloud, but I suspect the compression is done in the camera chipset long before it his the storage and IP stack, so that may not be possible. This is why people that want clear, high resolution footage use real security camera systems, or at least hard wired cams with their own NVR, no cloud involved.
It is better, but not significantly so. I’ve compared when I needed footage for the police and the SD card was just enough better to make out enough of a license plate.
None of that matters. First, if you want to talk about inflated and misleading numbers, wifi is the worst offender. That 574 is a max theoretical LINK rate. Deduct 30% for wifi overhead to get max theoretical throughput over that link. Then factor in that a perfect wifi environment does not exist. Then, I can go through the math for you, but basically you’re limited by the lowest common denominator, the camera which with its single stream AX 2.4ghz has a maximum THEORETICAL throughput of about 81Mbit/sec. But that will be nearly impossible to achieve. Have older 2.4ghz on your network? Cut that in half. Have multiple devices, they deduct from that bandwidth (all devices on wifi share the band’s bandwidth). A 2.4ghz device that is far from the router and connected at a very low link speed? major hit to your bandwidth. Neighboring wifi, microwave ovens, bluetooth, etc and it is very easy for 2.4ghz to fall under 10 megs. While that is still enough for one of these cams, if you’re seeing throughput issues, your wifi is likely to blame (for one or many of the reasons above) not the camera or internet connection.
Again the end result would be the same. They have a target bandwidth, whatever they set it to will meet that bandwidth. That’s the constraint here and there is only so much quality you can put through that pipe. Now, could they offer a higher bandwidth with less compression for subscribers or for a monthly fee? Yes, and I might consider paying for it. However then they run into problems with people’s wifi not being able to keep up.
No, I’m not. You need to understand that an image sensor/video recording does not operate like a camera taking still frames at very high shutter speeds. There are two things that will impact blur in a video:
Frame rate. Higher frame rate is the same as a higher shutter speed. The image spends less time on the sensor, moves less, and blurs less. Lower frame rate will have higher blur. Think of it this way, at 60 fps each frame is exposed to the camera for 1/60 of a second. At 20fps (what these cameras operate) each frame is exposed for three times as long, which means triple the motion blur. Exact same principle as shutter speed on a still camera. When taking pictures of sports, you crank the shutter speed way up. This is why slow motion cameras operate at tens of thousands to millions of frames per second. So you can see a clear image at extremely slow speed. If you dropped the frame rate on these cameras more, the blur would be horrific.
Compression - that adds ghosting which is very similar to motion blur and is most prevalent when there is motion.
I get what you’re saying with skipping frames, it is a good theory, record 240 frames per second then only keep 1 of them or whatever. There are two problems with that, that isn’t compression (which is built into the camera chip and done by hardware, requiring very little processing power), that would require software in the camera to do that, and it doesn’t have the processing power for that. Or they’d need new, specialized hardware (Wyze isn’t developing this hardware, they’re using what is available on the market). Second, at higher FPS the light requirements are much higher, which would make color night vision impossible and even daytime would be dimmer. That’s why in photography if you want to use a high shutter speed, it needs to be bright and sunny out or inside an arena with tons of lights.
If that’s the case you are likely up against some wifi issues or possibly something on your phone or in the app. Even at 20FPS my cams are smooth. Or maybe we have different definitions of “choppiness” but since professional movies are 24FPS, 20 should not be “choppy” by any definition. The only time I see choppiness (I would call it skipping in my case) is on one cam I have that is on the very edge of my wifi coverage, sometimes will pause for a second or two, or on my Panv3s when they are recording continuous, tracking motion, and logging an event, all while I"m watching the live stream, they can stutter a bit, probably just too much for the little processor to do all at once. But if I then watch the SD footage, it is fine, so it is sacrificing the stream to my phone to ensure the recorded video is fine.
To summarize -
Image quality - with the exception of wifi issues either reducing your resolution or dropping packets (which from the images you posted, does not appear to be the case, that’s the proper image quality for one of these cams) there isn’t anything you can do. That’s what these cams are capable of, unless they decide to reduce the compression and can do that via firmware and doesn’t require different hardware.
Choppiness, throughput, etc - that you can potentially improve by looking at your wifi devices, distances, placement, settings and tweaks in your router, etc.
Yep, wifi is “lowest common denominator”. Newer standards have helped reduce the impact, but the impact is still there and can be very significant, especially when you start mixing old and new devices with different standards.
Back in the days of 802.11b, a single device connected at 1Mbit link rate dragged all devices down to 1Mbit effective rate. It isn’t that bad now but it does still drag the performance of everything connected to that AP/band down.
I use minimum RSSI to kick devices when they hit a certain signal threshold, but for some, adding a second AP or a mesh system (if done correctly) can help significantly.
Basically just an AP setting that says if client signal falls below a certain level, disconnect (deauth) it. In my case this is more for having it switch more quickly from 5 to 2.4 when I go outside, or switch my phone to mobile data more quickly as I drive away from home. But mesh systems use it to help force clients to roam when they are “sticky” too.
I also have my basic connection rates tweaked (completely disabling the old B and G basic DSS rates to reduce overhead, and ensuring weak clients can’t even attempt to connect), but that’s usually not available through the UI of consumer routers.
Not getting your joke!? I haven’t come across a downloadable RAM (Random Access Memory). I was implying that as with RAM the speed is governed by the slowest chip in the memory bank.
These attempts at excusing or explaining away why the Wyze camera’s image quality sucks don’t change the fact that it does.
I don’t think wifi is my issue. There is a dedicated business class AP in the same room that these cameras are connected, and every other iot device in that same room works fine. If all the other devices were slowing down the connection then when I connect to the 2.4g with my phone it wouldn’t be blazing fast and rock solid, but it is. I can sit there next to this camera, while it chokes and spits out static, and watch streaming HD videos while a group of workers listen to streaming music on their headphones, all on the same connection. But even when the entire building is empty and it’s just a few iot devices there is no excuse for the wyze video to be both choppy and horrible… well I don’t know what technical term you want me to use, so I’ll just use “quality.” Horrible quality.
And that’s what this thread is about, the horrible image quality. It’s like watching the world through a thin slice of potato.
It would be nice if Wyze would just recognize that, and provide an option that wasn’t horrible quality, or an entire separate device that offers nice quality. I bought their newer camera which brags about a high resolution and apparently fell for the scam. As you say, resolution doesn’t mean squat. The quality of the image is just as good or better on my pan cam that can’t do 2k, and it’s less choppy.
But as it is, these cameras are basically good for giving you alerts when a hazy image causes a some pixels to change and give you alerts of break-ins or what have you, but if you’re looking to keep an eye on something or be able to watch from afar, choose something else.
is, but it reminded me of this:
. He forked you. 