SawMaster
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2015
- Messages
- 9,450
- Reaction score
- 8,317
- Location
- SC
- Country
- United States
- Dash Cam
- Numerous and ever-changing
HID's + white coloured cars in front darkens the image, don't think it's due to the CPL. I remember experiencing similar darkening with the A2.
The wider FOV seems to be the culprit, appears to be More susceptible to such darkening, never experienced such behaviour with 8 and 12mm lenses.
The lens takes in everything, then the metering decides what adjustment to that raw image is needed, so having a wider FOV would give that resulting problem unless metering was done in a manner to minimize that.
HID's and LED's have a different color spectrum range then incandescent lights do. That too needs to be figured into the metering, but currently all you can adjust is the output, not the input, of the color difference that the sensor sees. It would likely take a supercomputer to mitigate this in every circumstance. But the point I wanted to bring up regards this is that if you adjust to your headlights, then you may be reducing the visibility of things being illuminated by other lights around you. Since that can be other headlights, streetlights,or whatever the best you can do is compromise to get the best overall performance.
Another aspect of modern headlights is their sharper cut-off at the edges. What is in the beam is better lit at a cost of seeing things outside of the beam. This makes them seem brighter and better, but since we tend to look at what we can see, you see a lot less with them since your eyes are now adapting to their bright light only, and not to the general darkness all around you. We'd be far better off with the cut-off fading gradually like the older sealed beams do, but that won't sell. A cam will act similarly in losing that which is not being illuminated, or in washing out what is well-lit to get the darker areas. Up close, my old halogens give me more of light and dark both, but at father distances the newer headlights show things I miss. For general dashcams purposes, you want to capture as much view as you can, but with a telephoto lens and smaller FOV as we have here, there might be an advantage to the newer lights and their higher intensity, but only if they will tune the color range to be more like the general illumination being used where you are. As in your image, washout will still be a problem, but at that range your main wider angle dashcams should give sufficient details to cover for it.
Everything in life is a compromise of one sort or another.
Phil