is there a NVR kit with four 4k cameras that is great at night time? even better with full colors instead of black/white/green! if so, could someone please share a link
The best option is to roll your own.
If you want an easy to setup out-of-the-box experience then just get a Reolink NVR. Like the RLK8-812B4-A. They have several bundles that include “color night vision”.
Keep in mind there is no such thing as color night vision. Its a marketing term. It’s just regular bright ass white lights attached to the camera. So the area you want to record either has to be illuminated when ambient light is not sufficient or you have to rely on motion detection actually detecting motion and then turning the lights on.
I would say the vast majority of scenarios IR illumination is preferred over white light. It allows the recorded area to be visible on camera 24/7 without illuminating all areas 24/7.
One of the biggest downsides of white light on cameras is that it attracts bugs and fucks up your motion detection. You’ll be heavily reliant on the Ai Person detection.
So that is just not true. There are lots of very good ultra low light cameras. And the star filled sky looks like dusk in the better ones. No additional lighting needed.
Depends how they do it though. If they just lower the shutter speed then it’s easy to see the stars and other static objects in the dark. The problem there is when someone walks into frame they are just a blur.
The real trick is getting a camera that is sensitive to low light at fast shutter speeds, so you can see someone’s face well enough to identify them as they walk through the frame, even at night.
That is true. Some are much better than others. I have found the 4mp to be better than the 8mp, in general.
You’re misinformed. The modern “true color night vision” or “starlight” technologies are pretty old. Early 2010’s era. And they haven’t improved since then. Darkfighter, Lightfighter, Colorvu, or Acusense… they all either use IR or white light. They have marketing claims of things like minimum illumination value of 0.0005lux. But at that lighting the picture is absolutely unusable. You have to enable the white light or IR to get a usable picture unless you have additional flood lights pointing at the area of interest. All of the “reviews” of these cameras that show settings with built in lights off are using flood lights to illuminate the area of interest.
That’s only partly true. A lot of them still work without illumination but they do it by averaging the light from a number of frames together. This works really well for static objects (similar to a long exposure time) but just like a long exposure causes movement to become blurry, so too does averaging the frames, it’s just a different kind of blurriness.
I think a lot of people in this thread claiming colour night vision is possible are only looking at static objects, and all the people claiming it’s not possible are referring to moving objects. So in a way both are right.
I have three different ones. They work very well with the ambient light from the night sky on nights with no moon. Some better than others…
Also, the reason I brought it up in the first place is that when people are first shopping for cameras a huge turn off for most shoppers is having to view night time footage in black and white. So they search for other options and find “color night vision” and think they’ve found some holy grail. Then they get it and find out that the have just mounted a bright ass light on the outside of their house and don’t understand why the camera can’t see a thing when they turn off the light.
Based on OP’s wording he sounds like one of these customers.
Best one I have personally used is the Loryta IPC-T5442TM. It is not 4k but the night vision is the best I have seen.