Fishing for camera suggestions..

[camera-newbie 0]

They do claim to have some sort of low-light feature (light grabber II)..

If memory serves, LightGrabber is mainly a slow-shutter system (like "Sens Up" on many other cams). It allows the sensor to collect more light, at the expense of more motion blur.

 

Thanks for the info.. In your comment above, is a 'slow-shutter' system not so good for low-light areas or is there a better sort of system I should look out for (assuming the price for such a system is not super high)..? I'd think that by holding the shutter open for a longer period, you'd possibly introduce streaking if an object is moving.. Perhaps I'm overthinking this..

[Soundy 1]

They do claim to have some sort of low-light feature (light grabber II)..

If memory serves, LightGrabber is mainly a slow-shutter system (like "Sens Up" on many other cams). It allows the sensor to collect more light, at the expense of more motion blur.

 

Thanks for the info.. In your comment above, is a 'slow-shutter' system not so good for low-light areas

The whole point of it is for low-light... what it's not so good for is low light with a lot of motion.

 

or is there a better sort of system I should look out for (assuming the price for such a system is not super high)..?

This is just a factor of the camera, nothing to do with the rest of the system.

 

However, there's more to the equation than just the shutter speed. Some cameras will get better picture in low light by using different processing (I believe LightGrabber uses some additional processing in addition to the slower shutter).

 

In general, a lower-resolution camera will have better low-light performance than a higher-resolution model, given the same sensor size, because the individual pixels are larger and thus can collect more light.

 

A lens with a wider aperture will allow more light as well - f/1.2, for example, allows twice as much light as f/1.8.

 

I'd think that by holding the shutter open for a longer period, you'd possibly introduce streaking if an object is moving..

Yep - this is what's known as "motion blur".

[Digiscan 0]

To those with the 8332 or experience with it--and I assume its software is the same as the 8134, if not other vivoteks, here is a comment on an amazon review. Is it true? Seems incredible, can anybody vouch for this person being mistaken or not?

 

Although I can get around most of the aggravation with the configuration program, there is one glaring problem that makes this camera just not worth getting. Unless someone can prove me wrong, when you set up the camera to trigger on motion. You can only capture 7 pre-event frames the actual event image and up to 7 post-event images. That is a total of 15 seconds of snapshot images. The problem is that you can not get the camera to continue capturing snapshots immediately after the previous motion trigger. No matter what I do, I end up with about 12 seconds of missing action. I can't imagine why someone would want to get 7 pre-event images - they usually don't have anything significant in them. So what you end up with is 7 images covering 7 seconds and then you have to wait another 10-12 seconds before it does it's next set of images. By then you've lost perp - he's already in the house!

 

EDIT: Seems in fact acurate. I went to vivotek's website, got the manual to the 8332 and on page 78:

 

selectable 0-7 pre and post event images. I guess this is ok as long as the camera is able to continually snap images as long as an event is being fired--can it do this? I.e. if somebody is in frame for a long time and the first event is fired, once it finished recording the images since movement is still there it will immediately re-fire the event and record more, for infinite recording as long as the movement is there? According to this guy's post after an event there is a long delay, therefore making it basically impossible to keep recording images...