I just bought a Wyze Cam v2 from Home Depot. The night vision does not seem to work. I have checked the advanced settings to be sure the IR setting is enabled and I’ve tried both auto and on for the night vision. My alarm system station light goes from colored to black and white. I also hear it click. So, something happens. But the rest of the room is pitch black.
I’ve adjusted settings. I even blacked out the alarm station to be sure it was not providing enough light for the camera to think it was day. I’ve rebooted. No luck.
I submitted a case to Wyze and got an email telling me to contact via chat. I visited the help site but see no chat options.
Just out of curiosity, since you’ve checked your settings, if you operate the V2 in a dark room, do you see a slight glow from the 4 LEDs surrounding the lens? If not, probably something to relay to support on your ticket. If they are not powering up you will definitely see a darkened room. (Note to whoever reads this in the future, this does not work on the Pan cam, as its Infrared lights are invisible to the human eye).
I’ll check when I get home for the LEDs. Thanks for the tip. It seems their support is awfully slow to respond so if the lights are not on maybe its best to go exchange at Home Depot for another unit.
FYI - I thought mine weren’t working a while back, and I read here (somewhere) that you can see them using the cell phone camera. Turns out to be true. And mine were working, they just aren’t really bright enough to use in a large room.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll use the phone camera. But, this is not a huge room. If the camera cannot illuminate a standard American living room then I may have chosen the wrong device for my home.
Two more things on the above – not all cell phone cameras can see the lights. The iPhone can’t, for instance. They put an IR filter in front of the lens. My old digital camera can see them, as can most Androids, I think.
Also, on the lights – I forgot to mention not to have any white objects close to the lens during your test. That is because the lights are auto-bright. I put mine on my washer to check the lights because I could make the room totally dark. Problem is the camera saw the tan of the washer and lowered the brightness of the lights until I couldn’t see them. Pointing the camera UP solved the problem. The ceiling was white, but it was far enough away to keep the lights from dimming.
And I agree, returning it to HD would be much quicker.
A classic problem caused by something near to the light source (in this case, the IR LEDs in the camera) that’s reflecting it back, thus looking so bright that the auto-brightness is making the rest of the room too dark. This is the same problem people had when using conventional film cams and flashbulbs. The auto-exposure would adjust for the nearby things that reflected the most light, and the background became quite dark.
I’ve had a V2 pointing into a large living room for at least a year, and the only time it washes out is when I rotate it too far and it sees the wall, which becomes intensely bright because it’s close to the cam.
So get everything at least 5-10 feet from the cam, and see if things don’t ‘brighten up’ for you.
That is exactly what I would have done as well.