I’ve noticed a small difference between the two cameras when it comes to event detection of animals (or as it calls it, a Pet).
I’m using Smart Detection Events on both cameras, both cameras are aimed at my driveway. If people walk by with a dog, both cameras identify a person and a pet. But if an animal, like a squirrel crosses the driveway on its own, the Pan V4 doesn’t detect it, but the cam v4 identifies a pet. I don’t have a lot of examples to truly verify this, as only a couple of squirrels have passed by. I increased the motion sensitivity on the Pan V4 to 9, it still didn’t detect a squirrel. There hasn’t been a larger animal, like a coyote walk by, so I don’t know if the Pan V4 didn’t detect the squirrel because it’s too small, but the cam v4 detected it.
They’re actually two very different cameras released over a year apart. The Panv4 has higher resolution, onboard Smart Detections (so is probably using different algorithms), etc.
The higher resolution could explain why smaller objects aren’t detected, but it could also be various other factors. At one point people were saying some cams were no longer detecting wildlife as “pet” so that could factor in here too.
Have you tried increasing the detection sensitivity to see if that changes anything?
I had set the sensitivity to 9 out of 10, no difference.
It’s not a big deal. And I don’t have a large sample of animals walking across my driveway to be certain of how it truly behaves.
I always did find it strange though that they didn’t have a generic term like “animal” instead of “pet”.
I increased the sensitivity even further of the Pan V4, from 9 to 10.
A fox ran across my driveway last night.
The Cam V4 created an event and tagged it as vehicle and pet. There were no moving cars at the time, but there was a car parked in a driveway about 150 feet away.
The Pan V4 also caught it, but the fox was already past my driveway, and it only tagged the event as vehicle. It did not recognize the fox as a pet, But I assume the fox caused the movement that triggered the event, not the car because the car was parked all day/night.
I’m disappointed with the detection of animals on the Pan V4 because I do like to see animals like foxes and coyotes crossing my property, but it doesn’t seem to recognize them. I hope they improve this detection, as well as stop identifying parked cars with all events, there are always parked cars on my street. I’m only interested in the moving ones.
Overall I’m not too impressed with the Pan V4. I bought it mostly for the 4K, I don’t use the pan feature much. To be honest, it’s hard to tell the difference of the image quality between the Pan V4 (4K) and the Cam V4 (2.5K) unless you really zoom in on the image, even then it’s hard to tell.
It’s mounted outside at the corner of a brick wall, overlooking my garage. It’s sort of inline with my wifi access point, but they are at opposite ends of the house, several inside walls between them, but no brick walls. I had to use the 2.4 GHz wifi, because it’s too far for 5GHz. So that may be causing the live stream to be extremely choppy most of the time, e.g. every couple of seconds it freezes for a few seconds. Very annoying. Right now I have a Cam V4 right next to it, it is 2.5K and its livestream does not skip at all. I actually prefer the Cam V4 over the Pan V4. Better live streaming, the image is much brighter than the Pan V4. The events created are very similar in most cases, but the Pan V4 seems to not detect animals like a squirrel or a fox, the cam v4 does a much better job.
I realize that some of the things I don’t like about it might be specific to my installation, I.e. 2.4GHz wifi and the distance.
One important difference between the two is that the regular v4 uses servers in the cloud/on the internet to identify objects. The Panv4 has “onboard” identification, and it also attempts to only track things based on the identification of the object. So it may just not be able to keep up with a small, fast moving object (and its algorithm for identifying stuff is likely different too). So I wouldn’t really expect them to be exactly the same detection wise.
The Panv4 is still fairly new and probably will continue to get tweaks. The “motion tracking based on object type” is brand new. I don’t have one but if there is a way to tell it to track all motion (disable any object types) but still leave events/notifications on smart detections maybe that would help?
I just replaced a V4 with a Pan V4 in my backyard. I also noticed the Pan V4 does not detect small animals like cats and rabbits. While the V4 even picked up birds. It also caught animals as they crawled under the back fence, something the Pan V4 also fails to do.
Night vision and the spotlight also appears to be weaker than the V4 night vision and spotlight. Enough so that I’m thinking of moving a solar motion sensor from my driveway to the backyard. Or perhaps adding a sunset to dawn light. I found the sunset to dawn light doesn’t have to be all that bright to make a huge difference in visibility for my Pan V3s.
I’m not sure whether it’s the animal size or the difference in light that is causing the Pan V4 to miss animals. I get skunk, possums, rabbits, and cats often, as well as a groundhog and pair of raccoons once.
I think all of the things you describe can be attributed to the higher resolution of the Panv4. 4k requires much more light, so it typically won’t be as bright as lower res cameras, especially in color night mode (which relies heavily on ambient light). I’m guessing the smaller pixels also make the motion sensitivity lower, but you can increase the sensitivity in the settings, usually defaults to 50 and you can turn it up as high as 100.
I haven’t seen the Panv4 interface but it supposedly lets you set tracking to “person” “vehicle” etc. Make sure that isn’t enabled (if you’re using track motion).
I have sensitivity set to max,
I still have both the cam v4 and Pan V4 cameras on the driveway for comparison purposes. The other day a full size coyote walked up and down the driveway. The cam V4 detected it as a pet, but nothing from the pan V4. But yet when a person with a dog walks by the driveway, both cameras detected a person and pet.
From about 5:30 pm Sunday evening until almost 6 am Monday morning, there was a rabbit in my backyard. He’s a pretty frequent visitor to my backyard, often spending hours just sitting in the middle of the yard. As usual, he sat motionless in the middle of the yard most of the night this time too. But he moved throughout my backyard during the night. He varied from being about 45 feet from the Pan V4 where he crawled under the fence to within about 5 feet of the back of my house, which is where the camera is installed. Motion events were recorded frequently throughout the night, but there were only five pet events recorded, all while he was near the middle of the yard and relatively motionless. Not once did the Pan V4 actually detect the rabbit hopping throughout the yard, not even when he was within 5 feet of the camera.
It’s disappointing how poorly the Pan V4 does at capturing real movement. The V4 had no problem detecting every whiffle ball that flew into my yard from the neighbor’s yard across the alley. But animals are able to sneak through my yard mostly undetected by the Pan V4. Just amazing.
But this means I won’t be replacing the front yard Pan V3 with a Pan V4. Not unless they become better at detecting events.
Detecting a “pet” is a lot harder for the cam than detecting motion, especially in low light. Was your regular v4 set to pet detection or just “all motion”? Keep in mind that the AI probably isn’t as well trained for rabbits as it is for dogs and cats too (it seems a lot of wildlife has actually been removed from “pet” detections at some point too).
As mentioned before the higher resolution could be involved too.
All of my cameras detect Mr. Smelly Birds /Squirrels/Possums/Raccoons and all the freeloader cats including MFP as Pet. I have no pets just transient critter friends.
Overnight a coyote walked by my driveway and both the Cam V4 and the Pan V4 detected it as a pet. I suspect that the Pan V4 successfully detected it this time because the streets were snow covered creating more contrast vs bare dark asphalt, or all the snow made the image brighter. This is the first time my Pan V4 successfully detected the coyote.
The Pan V4 is set to record All events (Motion and Sound). The V4 was set to Smart Detection, with all motion events checked, as are all my other cameras. Motion and Sound is set to high on all cameras. I’ll be installing Solar Fence lights, which I hope will provide enough light to brighten the perimeter of the yard.
Birds 
/Squirrels/Possums/Raccoons 
and all the freeloader cats 
including MFP as Pet. I have no pets just transient critter friends.