FW 1.007 Image Quality Loss during driving?

jeez123

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Dash Cam
Blackvue DR650S-2CH
This might go beyond the scope of this forum, but i thought i'd might aswell give it a go in here before turning towards cs@blackvue.com for RMA and the perhaps the question should be... Am i expecting too much for the Blackvue DR650S-2ch that has a pricetag of US$380?

I recently upgraded from FW 1.004 to the latest FW 1.007 due to sensor issues during parkingmode.
In 1.004 it was waaay to sensitive and wouldn't go out of parkingmode when starting driving.
Closing the doors triggered events, going over speedbumps with 20km/h triggered events. And i have to say, Audi's doesn't come fitted with hard-as-rock suspension. ;-)

With 1.007 these triggers has gotten far less, but now the imagequality has gotten way worse, recognizing numberplates of oncoming trafic with speeds at just 30km/h are almost impossible, even in non-cloudy weather and not direct sunlight hitting the camera.

I've tried compensating for the loss of sharpness by increasing the brightness from 1 to 2 which didn't help anything, except making the sun look a whole lot brighter, and getting great blue skies, they look al mighty fine thou. Reverted back to 1..

I've read the topic about the "blurry parking mode"-issue, but this seems to not anything related to my issue, as my pictures generally are crisp and clear, but the details such as numberplates are getting increasingly harder and harder to read during recordings when driving / vehicle moving.

SAMPLES:
4.jpg
5.jpg

1.jpg 2.jpg

I'd say nighttime with ambient lightning from the lights outside are doing a far better job for my cam than motion during daytime..
3.jpg

When parked in daylight, everything is fine. Numberplates 10-15 meters away could be read with ease..
Below is a capture from a parking-session.
Untitled-7.jpg

VIDEO-SAMPLES: PLEASE force 1080p as youtube has it's way of pixelating the image while buffering..

Parking Session


Is the cam faulty, is the FW doing bad or maybe the lens has warped?
Any advice on what to go for?

Thanks for your time on this. I know it's a lot of TL;DR-subject. ;)
 
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I find your videos way too dark. I have my brightness at 4, but I have the polarizing filter, so there's some compensation for that. But I'd try running at 2 or even 3 for a longer period of time.
I'm not sure if the camera in the 650S is a fixed-focus one, or whether the module includes auto-focus. I've seen some posted videos that seem to imply the latter. If that's the case, the extreme contrast between the sky and the darker streets may be causing it to constantly "micro-adjust" the focus and/or contrast, and that can cause what appears to be blurring.

Just to confirm, what do you have your video quality settings at? Mine are FHD@30 + HD@30 (the highest) and quality set to "Highest". Anything lower (especially the second setting) will cause the software to do compression, which will affect the quality. I ask, because some of the diagonal lines in your posted screenshots have artifacts that look an awful lot like compression to me, which will make fine detail look blurry.

As much as it pains me to recommend overpriced stuff, you may want to consider the polarizing filter. You may find that you'll find the sweet spot where the sky brightness doesn't blow out the contrast as much, while allowing brighter street-level images.

Brad.
 
My current settings for image and quality are FHD@30+HD@30 and High quality. Will be trying out HIGHEST-setting and adding a few steps on the brightness-scale to see if this solves the problem.

Also, i'd thought about the CPL for the 650S, i'm not too scared of the price, if it solves the problem of the images. I might go order it on amazon, next month.
 
I look forward to hearing your results. I haven't done a lot of exhaustive testing myself, but generally speaking the actual recording is always done at the highest settings, and then during the saving of the video data to the SD, it's scaled down and/or compressed to get you the smaller file sizes. Video compression is a bit of a black art, and can result in "artifacts" similar to what you're seeing. Sometimes it's more noticeable, especially if there's actual motion involved (which there would be when driving).

The downside of going for no compression means bigger file sizes, which means slower transfer rates from the camera, and less space on the SD.

I have a 64Gig card in mine, and I ended up turning off Parking Mode motion detection entirely, because it was so sensitive that I couldn't really keep more than 24 hours on the card before overwriting. I couldn't begin to imagine running with the stock 16Gig card. You'd have to stop to download several times a day maybe. :-/
 
I'm running on a 128GB-card, so i'm not all that terrified of running out of space and constantly having to do a download-cycle (if needed) every few hours.

My cams are hardwired into the car and always-on.
The initial config was FHD@30+HD@30 on High and i've noticed that i was getting almost 60hrs of non-stop recordingtime (24/7). To be precise i got 57 hours of recordingtime (N+E+P-recordings).
That's almost 3 times the amount of time, BV states*, would be possible on a 128GB card. I think that is quite impressive nonetheless..
(* Table: https://www.blackvue.com/video-quality-settings-and-recording-time/ )

If i can get around 24hrs of recordingtime in FHD@30+HD@30 on Highest quality, that'd be just fine for my usage.

Tonight i changed the settings from High quality to Highest quality and set the brightness on 3.
vlcsnap-9405-02-05-12h43m00s682.jpg

Did a short test in the city with rain on the windscreen and ambient city-lightning. Quite hard conditions for the cams.. ;)

Although the frontfacing cam seems to have a bit of a hard time capturing whats up ahead (due to the droplets on the screen), the result so far is improvement of the image, as the noise of the image did quiet down..


The artifacts are yet to be seen (hard do see in dark images if any), so i'm waiting for some mid-day lightning scenrarios for testing out the new settings in a "driving scenario".
 
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Did some driving the other day, during mid day lightning... Quality increased - hurray!! :)
vlcsnap-8965-07-13-01h30m46s142.jpg vlcsnap-3194-08-03-01h42m33s716.jpg vlcsnap-1617-04-19-03h11m37s473.jpg

To compare, i did a sample on the same stretch of road as before:

vlcsnap-3491-11-10-18h19m00s693.jpg
vlcsnap-5707-10-01-09h49m44s494.jpg vlcsnap-1286-03-01-12h15m25s638.jpg vlcsnap-4140-11-12-20h13m51s404.jpg

I very much appreciated the advice of going for Highest bitrate with some extra brightness-level. That helped a LOT!

Thanks!
 
Great news. And yeah that looks *much* better. :)
 
Tilt the camera down a bit There is too much sky in them which will make the images dark.
General rule is 1/3 sky 2/3 buidings and road. Look on the end of the camera and use the brand name as a level and tilt it one or two clicks down

I have my camera set on about 80% brightness and get pics like this.. It is very rare to be able to read plates on moving cars but if you pause the video can usually be read THe attached pics were taken off my old DR 400 so the 500 series would be better
 

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Thanks for the advice, problem being my frontcam is placed above the RVM which does a lot of blockage for the camera as you can see in my last post.

IMG_20170705_224938.jpg

I'm not able to fit the camera below the mirror, because of STEALTH.. :D
Well, for 2 reasons
1) the mirror is angled far to near the glass for the cam to be able to fit under. And if it did, i wouldn't be able to adjust the mirror correctly, nor do the tilt-back for night-driving.
2) I wan't the best top-spot view for the cam, and by positioning the cam above the mirror it reasonably hides itself from the public not noticing it being there.

So, the best location for the cam might be below the mirror, but this placement can't be done without the cam getting stuck in the middle of the windscreen..

I had it tilted a click up before but figured out it almost didn't capture the front of the bonnet.
For now, this has to be the best setting for the viewing angle although i do think about killing the RVM and leaving it out of the car :p
 
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Probably illegal to remove the mirror Other solution is to move the camera sideways as it wont affect the vision and by the look of it the lens is already not exactly in the centre of the screen Heres how mine is mounted and has been there for 5 years without being stolen Scratches are where end was removed to allow me to replace the batteries in it 2nd pic is rear cam a DR450 and the 3rd one is what I use to attach them as it allows them to be re moved easily for use in another car. I have a spare power cable for that The last one shows a pic from the DR 500 and if you zoom in you can read the plate in front quite plainly Extra Kudos if you know where it was taken Clue its in a little town near a Canyon in the good old USA Blackvue  end.jpgPassat rear cam.jpgIMG_0117.JPG20140614_072843_N.jpg
 

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I have BlackVue DR650S-2CH for about two weeks, replaced my old Chinese Mini0806.
Yesterday I took a look first time to records and I was unpleasantly surprised at the poor quality of video. It is waaaaay worse than old Mini806 camera made :(
And that's for ~300 eur !!!
Needless to say, all the settings (video and image) configured to highest modes.
Daytime records are more or less acceptable, but at dusk picture are crispy and mostly no way to see license plates clearly.
At day, it is clear that polarization filter is needed (do Blackvue have such??)
At least with such expensive camera I am dissapointed.
 
You can get a polarizing filter for the 650S. It's not cheap, but it does improve things. You'll want to bump up the brightness slightly to compensate. I'm running at a brightness of '4' I believe (the new version of the Viewer no longer lets me access Settings via the cloud app).
 
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