<p style=“text-align: left;”>I just installed my Wyze Cam and when zooming in it gets pretty blurry. I tried changing between HD and SD but they look exactly the same. I attached screenshots (SD or HD is in upper left hand corner)</p>
Anyone have a similar experience? Any fix?
Yes, I’ve been meaning to post about that too. I can’t tell any difference between HD and SD.
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<p style=“text-align: center;”> I am also having the same issue. HD looks quite blurry and SD looks identical.</p>
Same here. HD and SD look the same. Can’t tell any difference.
Same issue here. I just emailed support about it. Has anyone else gotten a response from them?
I emailed support but so far have not received a reply. I will post back here once they get back to me and please do likewise so we can determine the fix for this issue.
I received a response…and it wasn’t what I expected. By definition, SD and HD are different resolutions…yet they are claiming it’s just a bandwidth setting with no resolution change. Sounds like the SD/HD is just marketing hype. Bummer, but for a $20 camera its still a good deal. Here is the text from the email:
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for contacting us, and apologies for the delayed response. We’ve had a huge amount of interest in the Wyze Cam and it’s taking us a little longer than usual to respond to emails. Thanks for your patience.
There isn’t a resolution difference between SD and HD. The difference is in the bandwidth which will make it a little choppy or laggy in SD mode.
Thanks, The WyzeCam Support Team
I also received a reply which I was not expecting and sounds very similar to your above posted reply. See below for details from tech support.
Thanks for your patience. According to our tech team, the SD footage takes less frames in and the video will be choppier. However, some users do report that they can’t tell a solid difference. The SD function just doesn’t lower the image quality very noticeably. I know that with continuous recording, the camera will store over 10 days on SD and over 3 days on HD, so there is a frame rate difference.
Sounds to me like basically the difference between SD and HD is really the frame rate rather than the resolution. Not sure i believe this as I don’t really notice a difference in frame rate when switching between modes. Hmmmm
Those responses seem odd, given that the displayed bitrate doesn’t change if I switch modes, either. I wonder if it only affects recorded data, and not streamed.
I got a good explanation for the difference. It’s not resolution, as one might expect: that’s always 1080p. And it’s also not frame rate, which is a constant 10fps. What it is: higher (SD) or lower (HD) compression of images. Pretty much the same thing as compression level on a JPEG image. The more compression, the blockier and more pixilated the image appears. You can see the effect if you save a JPEG from an image editor in both low and high quality. The file will be both smaller and more pixilated in the low quality image.
This pretty much explains what I see from WyzeCam video. If you look at an area of the image that contains a smooth gradient of color and zoom in on that, you can see in the SD mode that there are more distance steps (pixelation) as you look across the gradient. It also explains why sometimes you don’t see much of a difference in the data rate between the two modes… Some images don’t lend themselves to much compression (lack of large areas of the same color/intensity). If the camera is seeing such an image, then it makes sense that the data rate would be closer together in both modes.
Also, if the image contains huge areas of the same color, the overall data rate will be lower in both modes because the image can be better compressed. Try this: cover the camera with a black cloth, so the image is just total black. You will see, I believe, the data rate fall dramatically as the camera takes advantage of the greater compression that is possible.
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