Zenfox T3 Image Quality

Nigel

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Dash Cam
Gitup F1+G3ꞈꞈꞈꞈꞈ Viofo A229ꞈꞈꞈꞈꞈ Blueskysea B4K
Video sample:
A drive up the river with a mixture of cloud, sunshine, dark shadows under the trees, outside audio with windows down, licence plates to read, etc.:

Front view:
Sharp image, good colour, and nice exposure for everything except the sky, but over exposed sky allows for improved shadow detail.
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Rear view:
I have it mounted on the rear high level brake light rather than the glass, the glass is the recommended option.
This shows the limit of number plate readability for the rear 1080 resolution, the front view with its QHD resolution can read plates aproximately 50% further away.
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Cabin view, daylight:
Good image quality. The interior is a little dark because I have the EV setting for the interior camera turned down a little since I'm more interested in the view through the windows than the view of the interior. With the standard EV setting the interior view has good exposure but the exterior view tends to get over exposed. Conveniently, this camera has separate EV settings for each view.
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Cabin view, night time IR only:
I've got the camera mounted a bit off centre so there is more light on the front passenger seat than the drivers, and this is with EV turned down a little, but given that, the IR illumination is good, it does reach the rear seats and is bright enough for a reasonably sharp image (for an IR image), far from perfect, but one of the best I've seen from an IR dashcam. If you need better quality then extra IR lighting can be installed, maybe over the rear seats, which can then give a much sharper image.
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Cabin view, night time IR + car interior lamp:
With the car light helping out, the image is significantly sharper, not as good as daylight, but decent. You can get a similar improvement from the IR above without visible light by adding extra IR lighting.
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Motion Blur Test:
The Zenfox T3 has similar ability to freeze high speed motion to cameras like the Viofo A119 V3 with which it shares the front sensor. The Viofo A119 V3 being one of the fastest QHD dash cameras currently available. Most of the time the Viofo is a little faster, but there is not much in it, and sometimes the T3 will be the faster. The lighting in this image is obviously not good, but there is little blur on the high speed train, and the bars on the gates and the tree branches that have no motion blur are as sharp as is possible given the resolution.
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Summary
There are not many 3 channel cameras with IR to compare it with, but being 3 channels doesn't appear to harm any of the views. The front view image quality comes close to the best QHD cameras such as the Viofo A119 V3, while being optimised a bit for taxi use with wider angle and exposure weighted towards shadow detail rather than making movies. The interior view is good, and will include both front seats in most vehicles, using IR it gives a small improvement on the best I've seen previously. The rear view is better than many FHD front views, and all views maintain good quality even at speed since all views use decent bitrates, 45Mb/s+16Mb/s+16Mb/s, many cameras only provide 10Mb/s or 12Mb/s for rear/interior views and 12Mb/s isn't unusual for a front view on FHD cameras, so this gives nearly 4x the detail. Of course more bitrate uses up more nemory card space, but memory cards keep getting bigger, and if it is still a problem, the T3 does have the option to turn bitrate down.
 
Yeah i dont feel there is much wrong with the IQ of the T3, it could do with a bit of softening up i am sure, but as it is it is far from horrible.
 
Starting experiments with firmware...
So far I've experimented with contrast, oversharpening and nighttime ISO settings...


There seems to be a noticeable difference between the original and the experimental!

It will be very interesting to see what else you can do with it. Keep up the good work!
 
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