I just got the v4 setup. I’m glad I bought it on sale because I’m not impressed with the picture quality. There’s no way this is 2.5k quality And they’re just using the format specs, not the actual picture quality.
First of all, the colors are unrealistic In the image is far more realistic to the colors than the overblown colors on the V4.
The V4 has done nothing to improve the areas that are blown out and if it is, it’s minor improvement That gets overshadowed by the oversaturation of colors. Oversaturation creates noise as well. Zooming in on each image, even with somebody standing in front of the car. There’s no crisp crisp clarity that you would expect to be able to identify someone better than with the V3. Note. The V3 had been up for several years and had a dirty lens. But the point is is that the V4 should have been miles ahead in quality.
You lose the 12 second preview. The spotlight doesn’t shoot very far. You might as well buy an OG for $10 on sale if you really want the spotlight.
To me they lied about this cam. It’s really not an improvement As far as I can tell.
I’m hoping wise will allow you to dial back this oversaturation and then maybe it will look better. We are using this for security not for photographs so no need to punch up colors.
I thought the new processor was supposed to be better at balancing the lights and the darks but looks like they fell short and was just marketing nonsense.
The pictures are not at the exact time because it was the same SD card that I swapped and had to reset the camera after setting it up. For some reason when I inserted the SD card. So there was some lighting changes so you can’t make a perfect comparison. But like I said, it still struggles with it’s dynamic range And its image quality.
I say if your V3 is working fine go for that or go for the cheaper OG as I highly doubt you’re going to have any noticeable improvement. They both are artifacty
I posted some night comparisons of my OG vs new v4 in another thread, and about to post some day comparisons. I do find the v4 better than the OG, but I believe the v4 needs some further adjustments. Apparently they did some changes in the most recent firmware to try and eliminate some reddish hue but I think they overcorrected causing colors at night to be more muted than they should be.
That being said the image quality is still very good and definitely better than the OG in both day and night.
To clarify, which is the v4 in your pics, the second? To me that looks significantly better, even though the forum reduced it from 2.5K to HD.
Don’t be fooled by the perceived image quality. Zoom in on your images if you have the different cameras to compare. Even from day one the V3 when you look at it on a small screen at a distance had a sharpness to it. But when you actually had to identify a plate or person, you would find out that it’s far from the quality that they stated is. The low bit rate they use is the major floor.
Yes, the oversaturated one is the unrealistic V4. So I’m sorry to report that they didn’t reduce anything as far as I can tell because those greens are not natural and the first picture is what I’m actually seeing with my own eyes. The fence is a pale red, not this weird color that I see in the other one. And like I said watching motion it’s just as artifacty as the OG that I have as well as the V3.
I don’t know how they can claim the quality that they do.
Your eye is being tricked when you initially look at the second image because you see contrast. But I feel that because they’re blowing out the colors, it’s affecting some of the quality that could have been there in the image. They really need to allow us to adjust the image settings.
I also don’t understand that every time I turn on this cameras the image looks blurry because it is being reset to 360. Does that mean it’s also recording in 360? Does it only record in one resolution. I hope so because I’ll be pretty ticked off if it records only in the image quality that is currently set. Please someone confirm that it always records at the best quality it can. I don’t like I have to switch my settings each time. But every time that I’ve logged into that camera, the picture looks horrible and that’s because it says it’s 360 p. I don’t recall having to change any of the settings on the other versions. I’m assuming they’re doing this because they want a quick connection, but I wanted to remember my settings.
I’ve done comparisons on the PC using full resolution images from both cams. There are spots the v4 needs improvement on, and some may not be fixable (focus area seems smaller for example).
It will take some time to decide for sure but so far the clarity of the v4 is significantly better than the OG at night. Not a massive difference during the day, but the night is where I wanted the improvement. I’m hoping they will make some adjustments to improve the color at night though.
Yes it is tough when comparing two images with different saturation or other settings, one may trick you into thinking the other looks better. But my guess is most people find the oversaturated/overstated colors more appealing and Wyze is probably intentionally setting them to satisfy that.
I don’t find those colors to be too terribly oversaturated or overstated though, clearly they are a bit above “neutral” but nothing ridiculous. I think your v3 is undersaturated, so neither is perfect.
I paid $15 ish for the v4 so I in no way expect perfection, but so far it is an improvement over the OG. When I tested out a v3, the motion blur/ghosting/artifacts were awful and it went right back. The v4 has shown none of that (and the OG is very good with it too, mainly at night it would have some, but the v4 is better in that department too).
Well I ended up paying more being duped into thinking it was a good price because they were doing free shipping.
Then I saw the OG going on sale for 10 bucks.
Wise should realize this is not a cam for webcaming and we don’t need fake oversaturated colors. My first image shows exactly the colors that those trees are and the other one makes it think it’s summertime. You don’t have to punch up the colors to create a better dynamic range and contrast. The colors aren’t reality and this isn’t Fujifilm. , Fujifilm was known for making their chemistries on their film. Punch up the colors artificially because it appealed to people to have more vibrant colors.
What I want is clarity over color. When the V3 came out people were saying The blown out areas were due to the night vision sensor levels that had to be set to be able to do color at night. But I thought I read that the V4 was supposed to have a better dynamic range and I’m hardly seeing much difference if I’m seeing it at all.
I purchased one v4 to see how it compared to my OGs and if it might help with the night time artifacts the OGs were seeing (one of them specifically is an area where I want good clarity at night).
So far I’m pleased with it and feel it was worthwhile to pay the extra $5 to $10 over an OG, but it has only been a day, time will tell. I won’t be replacing my other OGs as they do not need the night time improvement and they’re working perfectly fine for me. Each camera has benefits and disadvantages I’ve learned, and honestly I’m not really surprised there are flaws or bugs given the price points.
It is not a high quality image. You can’t convince me otherwise. It’s definitely not 2.5k quality like on your TV. It’s laughable. It might be 2.5k based on TV resolution but not in bit rate, quality and clarity. It’s just not .
In my night test I can see the improvement in how it handles the light. The first image shows a V3 from the night before and it handles the porch light a lot better.
The second image is the V4
The third image is of the V4 in black and white with infrared. I’m not impressed. I don’t think it’s better. The image seems blotchy. In fact, I think the black and white image is worse than V3, but because the V3 was tricked by the porch light, it usually stayed in color mode. The V4 defaults into black and white mode when it’s set to Auto, which is interesting even though the light output’s the same.
It is 2.5K, there is no disputing that. Problem is they apply over 99% compression ratio which obviously significantly impacts the quality of the image.
Live view image quality is the worst, followed by taking a picture or recording from the live view or SD card which is much better but still highly compressed). The best quality is when you pull the SD card and view the actual video file stored on it, but it is still highly compressed. That just avoids your phone re-compressing it a second time and reducing the quality even more.
Their (and several other brands I’ve seen) target seems to be 1 megabit per second. To do that with even a 720P cam takes a ton of compression, never mind a 1080P or 2.5K.
That being said, anytime something happens in my neighborhood everyone with their Blink or Ring cams comes to me as the recordings they’ve captured are useless. The quality from my Wyze cams, even the 1080P ones, are 10x what theirs are (if theirs even record at all).
If you want true HD, QHD, UHD, etc you will need a hardwired system. Wifi just isn’t cut out for it. One thing many of us have asked for is for them to record a higher quality/lower compression ratio to the SD card so when a high quality image is needed, the user can download it from there. If you head over to the wishlist forum you can add your vote for that.
It is determining the amount of light based on the image sensor, and since the image sensor has more pixels and needs more light, it is less sensitive and probably impacting the decision to switch to night mode. The v4 I installed yesterday has stayed color the whole time and it just has street lights (my Panv3 covering the same area would frequently switch to night so I had to disable that).
Make sure you have the night vision conditions set to Dark and not Dusk but since that is the default, I’m assuming you do.
That’s another wish list item, the ability to use an automation to change it to night mode instead of “auto” so you can program it from like midnight to dawn or dusk to dawn or whatever covers the time your outside lights are off. That way you can leave it off until your outside lights go off, then the automation will switch it to night.
If you have sufficient light all night and are happy with the night image, just turn that mode off completely, I’ve done that on a couple of my older cams.
I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve always found this brand camera in all the versions. I have to be buggy the first few days of setting it up. For instance, I had set the V4 up in my house for a night and then moved it to the outside and installed an SD card and the camera would not connect to Wi-Fi. So I redid the setup and the camera was working.
Switching between 360 and "2.5k " randomly was a new one but sometimes it doesn’t switch so it can’t finger that one out.
So then today I get this pop-up that doesn’t want to go away every time I try to access the SD feed but yet it’s playing in the background so I don’t know what’s up with that.
The only thing I could think of is possibly some of this nonsense has to do with that I had Smart focus toggled on. I’ve toggled it off after seeing some posts about smart focus causing many issues in various areas of performance. I’ll see if that fixes anything.
Right now, the pop-up is quickly flashing And vanishing as it loads within a quarter of a second, so I really don’t know what The deal was this morning but it was consistent.
I did reboot the phone since then so I assume they’re going to blame the Wi-Fi or the router or the phone rather than how their system works compared to my v3s, which seemed to have been more stable and consistent out of the box other than day one when I would usually get some random freezing while setting up the cams. Like I said, every version of their cam on day one of setting up, I’ve always had it act glitchy and then seem to work itself out.
He does an awesome job with his comparisons and consistency testing so it’s easy to compare any model of any camera. I often watch his stuff to figure out what the differences will be with anything related cameras.
(s) like theirs.
