Panorama X2 (1.02.04) vs Lukas LK-7950 WD (Fi07) - Night

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The Lukas is gathering lots of interest at the moment and rightly so as it is a very high featured dual camera.

The X2 has been available since October 2014 and the Lukas has just hit the market this month (March 2015).

Both cameras are high end Korean models featuring parking modes and builtin battery discharge prevention.

The Panorama has a touch screen display, whereas the Lukas goes for the minimal approach with just an old school LCD text display like the old clocks you saw in cars or on the front of a VHS player.

To balance things out, the Lukas has Wi-Fi connectivity and connects to your smart phone.

The Panorama runs at 15Mbps on both channels so 30Mbps total, and the Lukas runs at 7Mbps on the front channel and 5Mbps on the rear channel so uses just 12Mbps total for both channels - less than half the data.

The Panorama uses seperate microSD cards for front and rear video, whereas the Lukas uses one full size SD for normal driving video for both channels.

For these comparisons the X2 was running firmware 1.02.04 and the Lukas Fi07 - both the latest version available for each camera at the time of writing this.

So how much difference in picture quality is there?

Let's find out what night time footage looks like.
 
You can see from the example screenshots that the Lukas has a noisier image due to extra sharpening and the lower bitrate on offer. If anything it has potentially too much sharpening on Fi07 although this does sometimes help with reading numberplates and road signs as you can see.

I run the X2 on lowest brightness to help with reading numberplates and the X2 brightness setting only affects night time video. As it gets darker you can see this setting starting to kick in.

The X2 still has the edge during the night time, producing cleaner footage, but at the same time is using more than double the amount of storage that the Lukas does so it is a trade off.

The colour tones of both cameras are very different - the X2 is a warmer yellow image whereas the Lukas is a cooler bluer image - this can be seen the most obviously in my headlight beam patterns.

Both cameras are using the same Sony Exmor IMX322 sensor.

To be honest there's not a huge amount of difference at night and they both do a very good job - the X2 again captures slightly more detail at night and the video seems slightly higher resolution than the Lukas video, but it is a new product and requires tweaking to get the most out of the hardware.

Picking between these two is going to be a choice between all out image quality or features - for all out image quality the X2 is better, but for features such as Wi-Fi the Lukas is better so it will all come down to your specific requirements.
 
Funny how one camera have a blue tint to the night footage and the other one a yellow tint, no doubt Ti and Zoran do ther things different.

I wonder why Lukas are so focussed on low bitrate, even with 15 mbit you still have a fair ammount of footage on a 64Gb card.

My reason for not liking any of the cameras is ther shape of the front camera, so i am glad i dont have to choose between these 2.
 
There may be a colour temperature setting in there somewhere mate - it's not just Lukas who use the low bitrate but BlackVue too and many other Korean brands do the same. I guess they're just not convinced the higher bitrate offers so many advantages.

The local market Panorama type devices even sometimes just do 12Mbps (especially the ones destined for China) - it's just for the Western markets they do the 15Mbps versions so I do sometimes wonder if they just see diminishing returns and they're playing the numbers game.

The Lukas on Fi07 is definitely doing a better job than it was on Fi05 as that smeared night video and felt more at the Mobius level - Fi07 has brought it up beyond the level of things like the Mini 0806 which produces a very similar night time image in terms of colour temperatures. Brightness wise the Sony sensor can pick up more details at night towards the edges of the frame.

The Lukas cameras are definitely bright at night - they can go brighter too - I'll do another test with them both set at high next and see how they fare then.
 
I definitely prefer Panorama's night video, it's cleaner. Like you have said, Lukas has lower bitrate video so they have to compromise somewhere. It seems in order to make the night video looks brighter, may be they have tuned the exposure or ISO up, but that creates lots of digital noises.
 
Funny how one camera have a blue tint to the night footage and the other one a yellow tint, no doubt Ti and Zoran do ther things different.

I wonder why Lukas are so focussed on low bitrate, even with 15 mbit you still have a fair ammount of footage on a 64Gb card.

My reason for not liking any of the cameras is ther shape of the front camera, so i am glad i dont have to choose between these 2.


TI chipset has limitations of data processing amount. All Korean manufacturers who uses TI for their dashcams I have been communicating with about rising a bit-rate ( just as a beta test FW ), they refused to do this because afraid of bricking device. However Russians do experiment quite successfully with high bit-rate on TI dashcms ( @BlackVue ), but of course this puts a lot of stress on TI and nobody knows how long it works before it crashes.
 
For technical data of Lukas 7 + 5 Mbps it does not a bad job.
 
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