I have another brand AI floodlight camera that detects motion approximately 30’ just like Wyze. But Wyze’s new floodlight camera seems more powerful than the one I own.
Recently, I’m dissatisfied and frustrated with my current floodlight camera because it can’t pick up anything beyond my sidewalk. I can’t examine any suspicious events that happened in my front lawn that made me scratch my head.
I’d just like to see my videos reach the closest roadside lane to my house. That would be 60’ I guess?
If two companies in the same market producing the similar products, one claim better specs in terms of resolution and FOV, but their products don’t do certain things that might matter to consumers, like “I’d like further reach of motion detection”, then why claim “bleeding edge” technology?
I asked the Product Manager about this during AMA event for this product. He said:
So, it can make detections further than 30’ in good lighting conditions in certain situations, but they don’t want to overpromise this since that will be the limit for some people’s situations.
Part of the reason why you are seeing this limitation with multiple companies’ products is that for AI to accurately detect an object, that object needs to take up a certain number of pixels to maintain a certain confidence interval. A company can reduce the confidence interval by allowing it to try to detect with fewer pixels (farther away), but then there will be a bunch more complaints about false detections, so they have to be careful about that.
It sounds like if you need something to get a good reliable detection out to 60’ that you might want a telephoto lens or else something with much higher than 2K resolution. The problem with increasing resolution though, is that it performs even worse in low light conditions the higher your resolution is increased. For that reason, you might want to consider a Telephoto lens camera. Wyze does sell a 3X Telephoto with the OG Telephoto cam that you can consider, but the FOV is reduced because of it.
Those are the main variables you have to weigh though: Resolution vs detection accuracy vs FOV, etc.