A great night vision camera for about 25ft (recognition)

This is a bullet style camera by CNB (a good respected less expensive brand), with an adjustable (varifocal) lens 3.8-9.5mm (just unscrew the end cap and the two little levers are right there, along with a joystick button to access the menu options). I bought mine from surveillance video, and am very pleased with the camera. The model number is wcm-24vf.

We did testing on this, to upgrade the qsee camera. I've used a CNB BBM-24F around back and it does a great job. However, it is not weather proof nor does it come with a lens.

This camera mounts easily on the front of the house.

To give you and idea of distances, the bird feeder is about 15 ft, the birch tree is about 40ft. They have smart IR, which somehow acts to reduce the IR white out effect you can get.

The back yard is pitch black dark. On the front of the house with the other lights the picture will be even better. The lens has been set to ~9mm which is recognition quality video at around 25ft. If you think better in angles this is about 30 degrees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pJYOaEOmwA

Second is the same camera with the IR augmented by a CNB MIR1000 illuminator. Wow, what a picture. If you've ever looked at the Raytec site and wondered if that was actually possible...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmhBusWZwok

The MIR1000 is actually pointing a bit to the left of Kim, look where her shadow is (or the bird feeder shadow) to get an idea.

If you wanted a simple system and had a extra computer you could buy a used Axis 241S server ($100 used on ebay) and use the free version of their software, or buy the $50 version of Vitamin D or $50 for Blue Iris.

I've also attached a pic for pixels per ft vs. quality, just remember that you have 640 pixels across roughly with analog cameras.

 

need 4K resolution!

 

Oops, model number is WCM-20VF, not 24VF...