A friend wants to monitor for a short period of time a parking lot area. So, he installed his Cuddyback trail cam. It works fine, but at night is "blinded" by car headlights and tail lights. At this point, he likes the simplicity of the game cam, but is there such a camera that would do better with the car lights at night?
You'd want a conventional security camera with a "Wide Dynamic Range" (WDR) feature. It has a much greater latitude in handling extremes of brightness/darkness.
Please note that the critter in the photo has neither headlights nor tail lights.
At the present time, my friend would not have said anything different or more.
One here
nice find, though expensive.
The night photos of license plates were not taken dead on, so I wonder how the headlights would affect a straight on photo.
Per taxed and spent:
Is the parking lot area lighted?
Here's a $98 el-cheapo cam that works reasonably well at night on a lighted lot: HTTP: //ExtremeSurfCam.DynDNS.org (select "Parking Lot"... and you can see clips from past times if you click the "all clips" radio button.
So far it has:
1) Fended off a lawsuit by a woman who claimed one thing but did another vis-a-vis tripping and falling.2) Served as conclusive evidence in a case against armed robbers (didn't get the license plate #, but confirmed make/model/color of vehicle at the exact time of the robbery)
An identical cam on the other side of the building served to apprehend some kid who had robbed somebody across the street - positive ID too.
Placement might be an issue. These cams are 10-12 feet off the ground so they do not get headlights directly.
These are not "Security" cams - just a bunch of cams to let windsurfers see how things are on a windy day without calling the windsurfing shop owner every five minutes.
But from a "Security" perspective I would also be interested in glare-tolerant cams because my experience so far has been that any moron with a flashlight can defeat any camera I have used so far just by shining the beam at the camera.
I've thought about putting a security light behind a game camera. Ideally, the light would come on just before the camera took pictures. The bright security light might win the battle allowing the cam to get a decent picture.
+1
Per Dean Hoffman:
A 500w halogen light gets you some pretty decent detail. e.g.
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