Night time video

[Bluenose]

Hello folks,

I have the Nextbase 622GW and I'm not impressed with the night time videos that it produces. There is absolutely no chance of identifying the registration number of an oncoming vehicle if it were needed.

I'm wondering what settings you chaps use on your cameras. I have mine set on 1080p at the moment.

Any help/guidance that you can offer this 82 year old wrinkley will be very much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Shaky]

I think it seems to be the standard with these cameras as mine is terrible at night also. I'm running the latest FW as well.

 

[kamkar]

Yes little things like a plate capture you can forget about in low light,,,,, and sadly that dont even have to be pitch black night or a unlit rural road.
It is a simple technical limitation of the hardware used in all current dashcams.
It is also why in some dashcam videos you will hear the driver call out a plate,,,,,, doing that is a very good habit to pick up.

Many brands do have videos where you can easy pick up plates on vehicles around them, but then those videos are most often filmed in a Asian town at night that have a higher nighttime light level than most Danish towns in the daytime in winter,
AND ! Most important the difference in speed in between the camera car and the vehicles around it is very small, cuz if say you drive as slow as your car will allow it at night, and past a row of parked cars, you should then also be able to capture their plates
It is also a photo / video technical problem in itself, low light require a longer exposure time, but a long exposure of things that move are no good and will result in notion blur, if you take that to the extremes you get those sweet photos of the milky way, or those pictures of traffic, where the traffic are just coherent streaks of white and red from the cars headlights and rear lights and you dont really see any of the cars.


What you can instead focus on, and your dashcam will do 100 % day or night, maybe only with the exception of really thick fog is, your dashcam will always log your own driving in relation to lane markings - road side - traffic light colors, and those things will still fend off a lot of possible fraudulent claims against you.

 

[Bluenose]

Thank you very much kamkar, that information is extremely useful and your time taken to write it is much appreciated.

Moving on then from night settings, what do owners/users of the 622GW feel are the best settings for everyday use. For instance, should I really be using the highest resolution that is available?
My old camera, which was a Panorama X2 was very good and it used to video all of the time whilst I was parked whereas this one doesn't and I do wonder if it would actually record an event whilst the car was parked. The Panorama used to switch itself off if the battery reached a certain level.
Is there a list anywhere which shows ALL of the best settings to use on the Nextbase camera, or is it down to individual choice?
Thanks again for the valuable input, I'm afraid that age is very much against me when it comes to the techie stuff. I'm quite reasonable at it but more often than not I need a little guidance so thanks again.
These forums really are extremely useful.

 

[Skylar132]

Hello folks,

I have the Nextbase 622GW and I'm not impressed with the night time videos that it produces. There is absolutely no chance of identifying the registration number of an oncoming vehicle if it were needed.

I'm wondering what settings you chaps use on your cameras. I have mine set on 1080p at the moment.

Any help/guidance that you can offer this 82 year old wrinkley will be very much appreciated. Thank you.

why buy a 4k camera if you're only going to set it at 1080? if you're using 1080p at 120fps thats pretty useless, if your priority is reading number plates it should be 1440p or ideally 4k. you say at night the camera cannot identify number plates, this is normal for all cameras at the moment, even with the best cameras you're only going to be able to read the number plate at night if you're travelling in the same direction at similar speeds.

 

[Paul Iddon]

When I ran the 622, the video at night compared well against a Viofo 4K camera, but number plates always were, and remain, indistinct:

In good daylight the camera is/was excellent:

Maximum settings, maximum bitrate.

More examples on my YT channel.

Paul.

 

[kamkar]

You should always use the native resolution of the sensor in the camera, there are no gain using a lesser resolution and maybe be able to do 60 FPS instead.
30 FPS are fine for what is a accident recorder

If dashcams used big sensors like phones, it would be desirable to bin several of those up into a larger virtual pixel as that would mean better low light performance at a lesser resolution, but dashcams use CCTV sensors tailored for that kind of work and so have large pixels already.

My phone on the main sensor are 64 mpix, but in night mode it bin 4 pixels into 1 virtual pixel, so my night pictures from the same sensor are just 12 mpix ( binning 4 pixels into one )
Newer even larger sensors in phones, will bin 9 pixels 3 X 3 into one pixel and so the +100 mpix sensor will still make 12 mpix large night pictures, and on top of that phones will also use AI to smooth things out even more.

There are not really any secret sauce settings in dashcams.
I most often use the default settings and only change ( if needed )

Segment size - 3 minutes
Image quality / bitrate - maximum
Time zone +1 hour normal +2 hours now that we are on summer time.
WDR / HDR i most often leave off
G sensor i turn off, i will only use that in parking guard mode

There are the EV values you can experiment with, but really you should only use those to compensate say if you have a tint on your windows.
You can make low light footage brighter using the EV settings, but that will also be on in daytime so your footage then will be overexposed.

But i do recommend that people play around with their new "toy" to familiarize them self with its use, and get a feeling for what it can do for them, and it is pretty normal for people to be a bit bummed by low light footage.