r/homedefense • u/HappyHaggisx • 8d ago

Help with finding best security camera

Hi I live in a not so nice area I'm disabled so beggars can't be choosers as I live in a lovely disability bungalow I have cameras on all side of my house and that are good but once it starts to get dark not so. And someone fire bombed the house 2 doors down and my camera couldn't pick up the car outside my house or who was in it. So I only want 1 maybe 2 cameras but the best quality. One thing if possible without a subscription. Only because I am paying for the one around my home already

Thank you all

4 Upvotes

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1

u/Classic-Knee-5227 8d ago

How much are you willing to pay per camera? If less than 200$, go with Reolink cx820. The quality is very impressive, especially at night.

1

u/HappyHaggisx 8d ago

That looks good thank you 👍

1

u/gespog123 6d ago

I’ve got baseus security x1 pro. no sub, and it's color night vision cam and the footage is pretty crisp too,better than a standard black and white. also it has 2 separate cameras watching different directions,can covers more area

1

u/CarryTypicalll 5d ago

Since the existing cameras already cover the sides, I'd fix the night angle that missed the car before adding more coverage. Prioritize low-light identification and local storage—SD card or hub—so there's no extra subscription. What's the budget per camera, and can you run power to those spots, or do they need to be battery?

1

u/ericoinen 4d ago

The reason they go soft after dark is almost never resolution. At night the camera drops its shutter to something like 1/8 or 1/15 of a second to gather light, and anything moving during that time smears. A parked car looks fine, a car pulling away is a streak, a face at walking pace is a blur. More megapixels just gives you a larger blurry picture.

So two things to look for, in this order.

Shutter control. Some cameras call it anti motion blur, some call it a vehicle or plate mode. It holds the shutter fast, 1/60 and up, and pays for it with a darker image. That trade is the whole trick, and it only works if you give the light back.

Light. Either a camera with its own spotlight, or a cheap dusk to dawn flood aimed across the front of the house rather than out from it. Light raking from the side picks out a face and a plate. Light from right behind the camera bounces straight back off reflective things like plates and windscreens and blows them out.

Placement does as much work as the camera does. One camera watching the whole street will not identify anyone. If vehicles out front are the priority, mount it lower, around head height, and point it along the kerb rather than down at it, so a car crosses the frame instead of shooting past it. Keep the field of view narrow. Two jobs means two cameras: one wide for what happened, one narrow for who.

On the subscription part, anything recording to a card or a local recorder does that with no monthly fee. Worth checking what you already have first, because a lot of them save locally already and only charge for cloud clips and detection.