What are the best settings for recording plates at night

Ant

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What are the exact settings so that the VIOFO A119 (V3) will record license plates at night time ?

Currently the plates are blurry.

And the lens is clean.


_________________________________

Thanks in advance.

~ Anthony
 
Most dash cams have difficulty getting sharp plate images during the day and it's nearly impossible to do at night - and is impossible to do at night consistently. It's especially difficult in those areas that have smaller lettering, as in the US.
 
From photography perspective, the distance and angle of you and the car you want to capture determines the angular velocity between dashcam and the plate.
The greater the angular velocity, a faster shutter speed is needed in order to capture a clear plate instead of motion blur.
Problem is, at night, if you use a fast shutter speed, you won't be able to capture a bright enough image anyway.
It's only possble if dashcam has a larger and better sensor that can do, for example, 1/500 shutter speed at ISO 102400 and still get usable image.
For example, sony A7S camera can do just that, but not a dashcam.
 
Yes plate capture, even large easy to read EU plates are a problem at night, in general i say you can do it, if the difference in speed between your camera and the target plate are slower than you can crawl on all four.

If you notice sales videos demoing night time footage, you will notice.
1: it is in a town with severe light pollution ( high levels of light at night )
2: the plates on the other cars you can actually read just fine, well that car are just very slowly passing buy in traffic, or the camera car are slowly passing it.

You Americans have additional challenges.

1: your plates and the lettering on them seem smaller than EU plates.
2: often all kinds of silly background graphics are allowed ( EU plates are reflective white with black letters, any graphics like your national identifier letters like DK in my case are off to the left side )
3: often cars have just 1 license plate, in the EU cars must have two

The reason you get blurred plates are motion blur due to the slow exposure timing ( 1/30 second ) the camera use in order to provide you with fairly bright footage.
In general photography it is said if you want to take a picture of something moving at speed, you need a exposure time of at least 1/500 second.
And your dashcam can do that just fine,,,,, in daylight, but at night using a exposure time that fast will just give you a black frame as thats far too fast for the sensor to catch any amount of light to work with.
Your camera is as good as it get with current technology im afraid, so a good habit at night is to see the plate yourself and call it out for the microphone to record.
 
And in my state, the paint falls off the plate in a few years!
 
You Americans have additional challenges.
4. The roads are wider so the plates are further away.

It's only possble if dashcam has a larger and better sensor that can do, for example, 1/500 shutter speed at ISO 102400 and still get usable image.
For example, sony A7S camera can do just that, but not a dashcam.
I don't think your Sony A7S will produce an image acceptable for dashcam use with those settings, in fact it won't do a lot better than a Viofo A119 V3 whatever the settings...

What are the exact settings so that the VIOFO A119 (V3) will record license plates at night time ?

Currently the plates are blurry.
It might help if we could see the problem, can you post a video?
 
Nobody can really do more than suggest ways you can try to adjust your settings as there are too many variables involved- city lighting vs wide open country driving, glass tinting (and almost all cars have at least some tinting from the factory), if there's any reflections from the glass to contend with, whether a CPL is used and more. Each of us have to do some experimenting to find what is ideal for our specific situations.

Having a raw video to view can help us greatly with more specific suggestions. Everything with this involves trade-offs so the get best plate capture will mean some loss in other areas like brightness or color clarity, and you've discovered the one place which every dashcam struggles with the most. Don't expect much improvement from factory default settings but some improvement can probably be achieved without too much effort.

Phil
 
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