The image from this starlight security camera looks pretty good, but it's getting kind of dark.
You might think this camera is about to flip on its IR lights and switch over
to a monochromatic image. But check this out... This beautiful onboard floodlight
lets us maintain this crisp and beautiful color 24/7. So what is this?
This is raw footage taken straight from these Uniview ColorHunter security cameras. So how does
this work? How are we able to have a full color image like this 24/7? Well I'm glad you asked,
because that's what we're going to be talking about in today's video.
So how exactly does this work? Well there are two main features that work together to allow
ColorHunter security cameras to produce an image just like this. First is excellent starlight
capabilities. Now starlight technology has been around in the CCTV world for quite a while,
even in Uniview security cameras we've had technology called LightHunter. Now what
LightHunter or starlight illumination does is it allows a camera to see better in lower
light scenarios, so you get higher quality footage with less noise, less grain, better
contrast. But the LightHunter technology inside of these ColorHunter security cameras is actually
quite a bit better than LightHunter that we've seen before. First, these cameras have a wider
aperture. An aperture is the hole that allows light to go through the lens and into the camera
to hit the sensor. A wider aperture means more light can get into the security camera. And these
are also backside illuminated sensors, or BSI. So with a standard camera sensor, you have your
sensor lens and you have your light receiver, and between there you have just a bunch of junk. You
have wires and coils. It's essentially an obstacle course for the light to enter that lens and get to
the light receivers at the bottom of the sensor. With a BSI sensor, things have been rearranged, so
that immediately after the light enters the lens, it can hit that receptor. There is nothing in
between there to get in the way, therefore these sensors are much more efficient at collecting
light. So, just for reference, here is a standard LightHunter security camera installed out here at
Nelly's Security. This is footage at midnight, and you see, it actually does look pretty good,
just because our street here is so bright. But here is the same scene from a ColorHunter security
camera. Just with the LightHunter feature. So even this one feature alone is enough to make
this camera stand out. It's got much better low-light performance, and it just produces an
all-around better image. So what happens when you're not on a busy street like we are and there
isn't any ambient light at all? Well that's where the second feature comes into play. This camera
also has an onboard floodlight. So this onboard floodlight allows this camera to control the
exposure of the scene. As the scene gets darker and darker, the camera is able to turn on this
light and adjust the brightness automatically to compensate for the changing light, which makes
your security camera that much more reliable, because it's not dependent upon the amount of
light that you have available. And this white light really is how you're able to see color 24/7.
To understand this, we're going to have to get a little sciency, so bare with me. All color is
is just light. Different wavelengths of light. The lowest wavelength of light that we can see,
our eyeball interprets as red. The highest frequency of light that we are able to
visibly see, our eyeball interprets as violet. Just under red on this spectrum is a frequency
known as "infrared." Our eyeballs cannot see infrared, but certain security cameras can,
and this is traditionally how security cameras have been able to see at night. When it gets
too dark outside for the camera to take good footage, it switches its IR LEDs on and it lights
up the surrounding environment with a whole bunch of light that human beings can't see.
But since infrared is just one spectrum of light, all you can see on your cameras feeds
is a monochromatic image. There's no depth, there's no contrast. It can be hard to see
certain details. And you really are running the risk of missing a lot of important activity
on your security feeds. The ColorHunter security cameras work the exact same way.
When it gets too dark for the camera to see, even with its starlight illumination,
it turns on its onboard floodlight, but instead of an infrared light which only has one frequency
of light, this camera turns on its white light, and since it contains all the frequency of light,
that means we are able to see in full, true, and vibrant color 24/7. The tradeoff, obviously,
is you are able to see all the light that's coming out of your camera's floodlight. If you don't
like this floodlight, that's no problem. You can completely disable it. Just keep in mind that if
it's too dark for the starlight to work properly, you might get some grainy surveillance footage,
or even some motion blur. But it's all up to you and what your preferences are.
So that's pretty much all you need to know about the 24/7 color image
that comes out of these cameras. Let's go ahead and jump to a quick
unboxing so you can see all the features that this camera has to offer.
Alright let's go ahead and check this out. I have our two cameras here.
We have the turret and the bullet. Let's start with the bullet camera.
So in here we've got our quick-start guide, we've got our mounting template.
And here is our camera. And, of course, also in the box, we have our weatherproof grommet
and our mounting hardware. Alright, and here is our camera. It is a typical bullet camera.
It's a little bit on the larger side for a fixed lens, but I think it looks really nice. I like the
sleek look of this camera. We have a 4mm lens here on the bullet,
and you can see we have our two lights here which emit the white light. Alright,
we have this little compartment in here, let's open this up. And you can see this opens up
to the inside of the camera, and inside here we have a slot for a MicroSD card. This can hold
up to 256 gigs of storage. Now be sure to close this up nice and tight, we don't want any water
or elements getting inside that camera. When this is all the way shut, this is IP67 weatherproof,
so you don't have to worry about dust or water or anything like that getting inside your camera.
We've got pretty simple three-axis adjustment here. By twisting this knob
we can tilt the camera around that way.
And you can rotate it on the other two axes using a Phillip's head screwdriver.
Alright let's take a look at this pigtail. First, you see we have our Cat5 Ethernet connection.
We have our 12V DC connection, and we also have alarm in/out and audio in/out cables here.
So even though this bullet does not have a built-in microphone,
you can add your own microphone here with your cable in the pigtail.
Now let's open up this turret. Again, we've got our quick-start guide, our mounting template,
we have our little hex wrench to adjust the angle of the turret,
and here is our turret. It is nice and compact. I think this is about the size of just your typical
Uniview fixed lens turret, which is nice, seeing as how the bullet is a little bit bigger,
but the turret camera maintains this nice and compact form factor. We have our SD card in here,
just like with the bullet. This can also hold 250 gigs. We also have the two lights, these are
a little bit smaller than the bullet. We'll test this out and see if the smaller lights actually
emit less white light or if it's about the same. And the main difference between the bullet and the
turret, again, right here we have this built-in microphone. Since we have the built-in mic in the
turret, the only cables we have in the pigtail are the Ethernet connection and the 12V DC connection.
There's no alarm in/out and there's no audio in/out, so if you don't like the quality
of this microphone, well you're pretty much stuck with it unless you go with the bullet.
To adjust your turret, simply stick your hex wrench in this hole in the center.
Unscrew that and you have instant access to pan, tilt, rotate this camera
however you see fit. Once you have it in a place where you like it, just lock it back into place.
I really like the look of this turret. I like the size of this turret. I like
that it has that built-in mic. But if you want to install your own audio hardware,
you'll need to go with the bullet camera. If you like this size better, this style. And again,
this needs to be tested, but it does have larger floodlight there, so this might emit more
white light, but we will have to see, so let's go get these things installed and test them out.
Alright, so we are logged into the web interface here. This is the security
camera that is installed outside here at our office. It is a 5MP security camera
that shoots at 25 frames per second. The cool thing about this camera, though, is, yes it's 5MP,
but it's not like any 5MP camera that you might be used to because check out this aspect ratio.
It's 2880x1620. That is a 16:9 aspect ratio, which is just like 1080p, or 4K, or 1440p,
your 4MP cameras. This is a really nice feature, simply because most 5MP cameras, for some reason,
retain the old 4:3 aspect ratio, which, in the age of HDTV and 4K and mobile devices, the 4:3
aspect ratio really is becoming irrelevant, so it's nice to see this beautiful 16:9 image
here with these ColorHunter security cameras. The 25 frames per second is really nice,
the video isn't choppy at all. If you wanted to, you can jump in here to setup and come to
Video and Audio, and you can take this down to 1080p at 30 frames per second,
if for some reason you just want a higher frame rate. I prefer higher resolution to frame rate,
so I'm going to keep it at 5MP. Something else we have here is, since this is the turret installed
outside, I do have a built-in microphone. So I can turn the audio on, and you can see that now
we do have audio from out there. Let me jump out there and say something so you guys can hear it.
Alright, now let's jump here into the intelligent events to check out some of this deep learning
technology. You can see we have four intelligent events here: cross line, enter area, leave area,
and intrusion. All four of these events can be used with Uniview's Deep Learning artificial
intelligence to track human, vehicle, and non-motorized vehicle movement specifically.
So, you know, you're not wasting storage space, you're not
getting random push notifications in the middle of the night. This deep learning is great. Uniview's
been putting it in a lot of their more recent security cameras, and we have a whole other
video on our YouTube channel about it, so be sure to click the link in the description below
if you're interested in hearing more about Uniview's deep learning algorithms.
But for now let's jump in here and check out this line crossing. I'm going to enable this. And we
have a line right there in the middle of the road. And as we come here to the live view, we can see
that as cars pass this line, the orange box around the vehicle turns to red. Now the orange box
signifies that this is a motor vehicle. If that was a person crossing the line, it would be green.
And if it was a non-motorized vehicle crossing the line, I believe it would be yellow. And the color
red just means that the intrusion detection or the line crossing event was triggered.
Now there's just one more thing I want to check out with these cameras, and it has to do
with the white light on the bullet and the turret. So I'm going to get these two cameras set up here,
and we are going to pit them against each other to see which one is brighter or if they are,
you know, about the same. So to adjust the light, I'm going to come in here to image
and smart illumination, and right now we can see on this camera that we have installed outside
smart illumination is turned on. That just means that the white light is gonna turn on outside when
it gets too dark for the starlight to pick up a good image. If we didn't want the floodlight on at
all, we could just turn this off. And the control mode down here is going to determine how bright
the light is. So right now it's on "Global Mode." That means the light is going to adjust itself
based on what the camera thinks is a good level. We can turn this on to "Overexposure Restrain,"
which is still automatic. It's just going to tell the camera that we would rather the scene
be underexposed than overexposed, and that might be a good option to play around with if you notice
the camera is making your scene a little bit too bright. You can also come in here to manual
and set this to whatever you want it to be. If I set it to 10, for instance, the light
is going to turn on, even though it's not dark outside. So that gives you the opportunity to,
so you can set that really however you want it. I'm going to leave it here at Global Mode for
our camera outside. But again, let's get these cameras set up in here and we will test them out.
Alright we have our bullet camera set up over there. It is plugged in
and it is set up on our network. This room is totally dark, except for the television and the
computer screen. And you can see here from the image on this bullet camera that the starlight
is actually really good, because, again this is a pretty dark room,
but it doesn't look dark at all from the perspective of this security camera. And the white
light hasn't even kicked on yet. So let me go turn off that computer screen and the TV monitor.
As we can see, let me zoom in a little bit,
the white light has been turned on now. I'll try to focus this camera,
which is hard to do in the dark. Let me go manually turn that up as bright as it will get.
Alright, so now the light intensity is set at 1,000.
So this is as bright as that camera gets. And this is what that image looks like.
Now let's unplug this, plug in this turret, and try out the same process.
And now the turret is plugged in, connected to our network.
I have the brightness manually turned up to 1,000, the highest it will go. And we can see there's
really not much difference here, even though those lights are a little bit smaller on the turret.
The output is about the same. The overall image is about the same. So really,
whether you go with the bullet or the turret, you can't go wrong with the ColorHunter cameras.
Well, that about wraps it up for this video. I hope you found it helpful
and I hope you discovered today if this security camera is right for you. If it is,
or if you just want to learn more about it, click the links in the description below
to visit our product pages. We also have a blog post down there which you can check
out for more information. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and let
us know in the comments down below what you think of this ColorHunter security camera.
Thank you guys for checking out this video and we will see you next time.