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?
