Review on 📷 HDView License Plate Camera 4-in-1, Full HD 1080P Security Camera with IR Night Vision and 5-50mm Lens, Long Range Surveillance Camera with WDR and HLC by Katie Lee

**Update - Auto iris function failed after 5 months** I will contact the seller and see what can be done about it. Camera and provides the ability to monitor it online. The problem with the dashcam (model THD30B) is that while the cameras are advertised as 3MP, they don't capture detail very well, especially license plates. I decided to upgrade after several houses were robbed on the street. a professional gang of burglars, and the footage proved of little use to the police. Out of the box, this is a fairly large package - much larger than the cameras that came with my system. Anyone looking for sophistication is buying the wrong camera. Robust cast aluminum housing for installation in a junction box. You can wall mount it directly, but there's no stamped wire cutout that goes under the mount, so you'll need to plan for that. The camera has a BNC connector and the same standard 12V power plug as my camera. There's a small joystick on the pigtail that gives you access to the camera settings, which is hopefully waterproof as there's no good way to secure it. Aiming the camera physically at the target area is a bit tricky - there's only one hinge on the arm and you have to find the right angle by loosening the Allen screw and tilting the camera - it looks like teeth on the inside of the arm are closing they are stable, but also cause problems when scaling up. , as there's a small but noticeable grip point - it shifts the angle a bit when you tighten it, and if you need to aim between those points you'll have to get creative. If you're unfortunate enough to have a flat surface exactly perpendicular to your point of aim, you'll need to loosen another set screw to rotate the lever in the base and another set of screws to rotate the camera so it's properly aligned. Finally, by rotating the hinge to any point, you will get the desired compound angle. However, due to the design of the mount, this process does not go smoothly. Since I bought it specifically for license plate recognition, I'll cover the setup for that. I had to add a camera specifically for license plate capture, but would still be working with the analog system I had already invested in. Most LPR cameras are IP (digital) and expensive. I'm new to ALPR and found some free software packages to experiment with to see how it works. This camera has some pretty good features for a cheaper setup. The zoom is pretty good, which is important as I have to point the camera pretty far down the road for the angles to be smaller. The zoom and focus adjustments are done manually, it's a little tricky to get it right - zoom in a little, refocus, zoom in a little more, refocus. Repeat rinse foam as needed. I zoomed in to cover the width of the street (two lanes). Keep in mind that the point of focus changes when you switch from daylight to night (IR) lighting, so you'll need to fine-tune it even after dark. Start with the best possible image before messing around with other settings. (Depth of field - the range of focused distances - is very small at night, so you want to get the sharpest possible target area.) To get clear license plate images on a moving vehicle, you need to speed up the shutter speed. The faster the car drives, the faster you need to install the roller shutter. (I'm pointing to cars going at around 25 mph and they seem to be catching up well at 1/240 second, but faster cars may need speeds up to 1/1000 or 1/2000 second). , but increases the blur. You can't use it to read license plates at night, and you can also see cars - it's one thing or the other. Although it's pretty tolerable during the day. Other settings - you must enable HLC - (headlight cutoff) set to night time only - lower the level as much as possible to reduce glare as much as possible. You also need to turn off AGC (or as little as possible), turn off sens-up - which shortens shutter speed and increases blur. I have ACE (Adaptive Contrast Enhancement) set to low. I also had to fiddle with the day/night settings - it switched from car headlights to day mode and this prevented me from getting number plates on approaching cars. I lowered the day to night transition level a bit (D -> N) and raised the night to day transition level a lot (N -> D) and increased the delay to the middle and this fixed the problem . Some fine tuning was done. , but these are rough strokes. In my case, I had to point too far down the road for the built-in headlight to overcome the glare from the lights. I was able to get the rear number plates fairly reliably (see first picture) but the front numbers were blurred by the headlights (see second picture). which didn't work due to the distance) and finally settled on a narrow angle direction (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07V8KGVQC) which served the purpose. It's powerful enough, even at 100+ feet, to illuminate the license and ensure I'm reliably shooting it both ways at night. (third picture) If you want to use it with an automatic license plate recognition software, you need to find the RTSP stream from your DVR to forward it to the software. I've been trying to post mine here to help others with my system but Revane thinks I'm trying to send you somewhere else to buy and is ruining my review. Same goes for the manual for it - the online manual that comes with it does a poor job of explaining what the settings do, but I found a manual for another camera on the UK CCTV42 website that uses very similar software.