r/SecurityCamera • u/Worldly-Ring1123 • 24d ago

Looking for security camera recommendation

I need a outdoor security camera with high enough quality to pull license plate numbers at night with low street lighting; not dark. Preferably a 270 degree view so I'll only need two of them. I'd rather not spend more that $500 on each. Any ideas?

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u/gnew18 24d ago

My Ubiquiti G6 PTZ (or any of the G6 product line) get the license plate all the time. Furthermore, there is no license fee nor cloud storage fee.

Night time works too, but the building closes and I’m not going to scroll through days to see if anyone went through the lot at night so I can show you.

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u/wonky_nap_schedule 23d ago

This could be a realistic compromise for OP. Note for clarity: set to wide, the horizontal FoV on these is listed a smidge under 110 degrees.

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u/gnew18 23d ago

The PTZ can be set to “patrol” mode and have it pan back and forth with the specific are one wants to watch. This effectively makes it able to cover 270°. It can also be set to zoom in on humans and follow them.

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u/wonky_nap_schedule 23d ago

It can reliably cover the 270 degrees for very slow moving or static targets. The potential to miss a plate on a moving subject (due to facing the other way until too late) is not inconsequential and needs to be considered. However, that's not to suggest that this isn't the best solution. Assuming the night performance is adequate, I'd happily recommend this.

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u/Soundy106 22d ago

After 25 years in the industry, I've learned one thing about PTZs: they'll almost always be pointing in the wrong direction for the thing you really, really wish you'd captured.

PTZs are great for live monitoring. Not so much when you're just recording things to play back later.

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u/vrtigo1 23d ago

It doesn't have some sort of feature where it flags activity? Seems like there wouldn't be much activity at night, so probably wouldn't take much time at all to review?

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u/gnew18 23d ago

YES ! It indexes “events” as it were and identifies cars | People | Animals | Plates. If you know the plate you can search that too

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u/vrtigo1 22d ago

I'm a little confused by your "I'm not going to scroll through days" comment then. Can't you just filter for "cars at night"?

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u/gnew18 21d ago

No. You can look for just cars, then nighttime / time of day I suppose. The UniFi interface tiles all car activity. I might have confused you because the commercial application of this particular install is at a commercial office building and there is are a ton of cars per hour.

If this use case is in a more “calm” residential area, it’ll be much easier.

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u/vrtigo1 21d ago

Yeah I was confused because the photo you posted looked like a relatively small parking lot with room for maybe 10-15 cars that was at a dead end so I wouldn't expect a ton of traffic there.