New Night Vision option

I would definitely like to use Night Vision in darkness and not in daylight. However there is enough ambient light in darkness at my house that if placed in AUTO I do not get Night Vision which is what I desire. Are you planning to give us the option to use Night Vision in darkness and not in daylight ?

I need this:

New Option - Night Vision ON even with high ambient light in darkness but Night Vision OFF during daylight

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There is a setting when the camera is set to Auto for Dusk or Dark which sets the light level required to go into night vision mode. For your situation, the Dusk setting would likely be better.

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Welcome to the User Community Forum @tlhutch4!

A bit of clarification… You can use Night Vision whenever you want… Daytime or nighttime, dark or light. You get to make that decision. The question is: do you want that Night Vision to be Color or Black and White? You can choose. The Night Vision Mode setting only applies to the Black and White IR Night Vision (On\Off\Auto). Color Night Vision has no settings. When the Black and White Infrared Night Vision is Off, Color Night Vision is automatically On. The only way to turn it off is to turn B&W IR NV on.

As @K6CCC noted, if you want the cam to decide for you when to turn on B&W IR NV mode, then the Auto mode is your choice. You can choose to have the cam switch to Black and White Infrared at Dusk or at Dark, and you can choose to put your IR emitters to Near or Far. You can experiment with these to see what is best for you.

If you want your cam to be in Color Vision at night, all night, leave the IR Night Vision Mode Off. The cam will be in Color Night Vision by default all the time. The cam’s on board integrated starlight sensor will automatically enhance low light conditions with any available ambient light it can use… Up to a point. It can’t create light where there is none. Again, experiment. If there isn’t enough ambient light and the image is dark, it needs more light or you need IR Night Vision.

If you want your cam to be in Black and White IR Night Vision during the day and night, place the Night Vision Mode to on. It will stay on 24\7.

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Night vision on and off in the day time, Pick your poison :upside_down_face:


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SlabSlayer,

Thank you very much for you response to my question. I found it helpful.

However, I’d like to be more specific with my original question if I might. I wish to have my V3 camera in Black and White overnight and color during the day. If I put it in AUTO It stays color all the time probably because of the amount of ambient light in the neighborhood. Black and White is best overnight for me and Color is best during the day.

The only way I have found to accomplish this is to put the Cam in Night Vision ON overnight then switch to Night Vision OFF during the day. Do you know if there a way for me to accomplish this without my manual intervention twice a day ?

Thanks, Tom

Tom,

There is no automation process that I know of to switch the modes automatically for you. The IR modes are not available as actions in the rules.

This is something that can be requested in the Wishlist

As Jim indicated above, your only remedy is to switch the IR mode to Dusk so that it will try to change to IR mode earlier. However if there is too much light for this, it will stay in color mode.

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Was changing the mode from dark to dusk not fixing it?

IEatBeans,

No, changing the mode from dark to dusk did not fix it. Unfortunately it seems that I must go in and manually change to Night Vision to AUTO or OFF for daylight and ON for overnight to get Black and white in night time and Color during daylight hours. Not very convenient but it seems the only way.

Thanks, Tom

Changing the mode from dark to dusk did not fix it. Unfortunately it seems that I must go in and manually change to Night Vision to AUTO or OFF for daylight and ON for overnight to get Black and white in night time and Color during daylight hours. Not very convenient but it seems the only way.

Thanks, Tom

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Honestly, if you have that much light, you likely should be letting it stay in daytime mode. With the V3 cameras, it amazes me just how well they see in the dark. On my V3 cameras that are either outside (6) or looking outside through a window (4), most are set to lock in daylight mode with a few in Auto with the setting to Dark. Of the latter, essentially they never switch to night mode and even in a dark sky night, I can see colors and details quite well.
OK, granted that I live in a the suburbs of a large metro area, so it never gets really DARK here,…

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K6CCC,

Thanks for your thoughts regarding my sense that the videos on my V3 look better in Black and White than COLOR overnight (on one particular camera set up). I just went back to do another comparison and feel that in my situation I definitely prefer Black and White at night and COLOR in the daytime.

Granted the COLOR looks very nice also but Black & White shows more detail overall. Maybe it’s just me but my preference would be to have the ability to set my camera for Black and White overnight and COLOR daytime without having to do that manually as I do twice a day now.

Thanks, Tom

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Sounds like you want a way to schedule this. How about add this to the rules thread:

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Thanks for the idea but I went to the link and can’t really see how to add my wish to the list…Tom

Follow the link to the thread and vote for it at the top, then reply at the very bottom to add your post describing the functions you want added to rules actions (in this case, add IR Night Vision Mode Auto\On\Off to the Cam Rule Actions so we can schedule our own mode switch times).

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@tlhutch4

Night vision on/off/auto is already one of the requested rule actions in the list in the #wishlist topic. Here’s a screenshot of part of the topic:

image

So all you need to do is hop over there and vote for the topic (at the top) and optionally add a comment at the bottom to add weight to this request.

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Loki,

Thanks for the info…Tom

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Has there been a recent software change to Night Vision such that we can now get our cams to automatically switch from Night Vision at night to Night Vision OFF during daylight ?

I have three V3 cams and four WCO cams that I have set on Automatic and they all switch from night vision (Black and White) to daytime color vision when there is enough light outdoors. I leave my V3 Pro with night vision off so it stays Color 24/7.

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Not that I am aware of. The Auto setting will enable it when light is low enough and disable it when there is enough light, but it has always done that. The toggle will remain on Auto though. That is the problem you had though, too much light causing it to never switch automatically.

I don’t know of any way for it to change the toggle from On to Off without doing it manually.

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