IP4M-1041B poor image quality in Synology Surveillance Station

[mooch91]

Hi all,

I'm currently testing two fairly equivalent 4MP wifi IP cams. One is a Reolink E1 Pro. The other is an Amcrest IP4M-1041B. Both were configured as ONVIF devices (neither shows up in the Synology list).

The problem I'm having is that the image quality of the Amcrest in Surveillance Station (seems to be both Live View and Timeline View) is poor. I'm not quite up on IP cam functionality, so I don't know how to describe it properly - I don't think it looks pixelated per se, but the edges of features in the image are not smooth on the Amcrest. Even the text overlays are not smooth. I've included a screen shot from Live View here. It's better in the camera web interface, and when I take a snapshot from both the camera interface and Live View, they are nearly identical and of good quality.

Settings on the Reolink are H.264, 1920x1080, 10 fps, VBR. Settings on the Amcrest are H.265, 2560x1440, 10 fps, VBR. The Amcrest is running latest firmware. I've had the same results with the Amcrest changing it to H.264, changing resolution, turning substream off, and changing the other parameters as well.

Any thoughts on where I might have gone wrong?

Thanks in advance!



Left - Reolink, Right - Amcrest

[Revo2Maxx]

Hello and Welcome to the forum

First I am wondering why you are saying your running the same type of cameras yet you have the Reolink set for 1080p and the Amcrest set for 4mp? I mean why down scale the Reolink.

Also I am sorry but if the left picture as you said is the Reolink and the right is Amcrest the Amcrest has a Much cleaner Image.

Next issue is VBR is very bad and even worse with your settings not to mention you don't say what Bit Rate your running them at.

For best results you would want to change the h265 to h264h, Also want to use CBR, 15 to 18FPS with a bit rate of no less then 4096.

Also I am sorry to say the scene is to busy. The camera is at a poor level and facing at the wrong area of interest. You have a beautiful home and loads of nice things but a camera that is on the other side of the room and being made to work 10x harder then it should be with low frame rates capturing both in a dark room and very bright outdoors is a lot of data for a camera to process.

Then if your E1 is the E1 I think it is then that is kind of an unfair side by side seeing the e1 I know is a Optical Zoom with focus ability where the 1041 is a 4mp pan tilt with static lens. Means that has no focus and is a what you see is what you get kind of view.. So sure a camera with the ability to focus past the local area is better then a static focus camera. Again the indoor camera shouldn't be trying to work double duty and the Area of Interest should be in the room that it is mounted in. Not trying to push past to the outdoors.

[mooch91]

Hello and Welcome to the forum

First I am wondering why you are saying your running the same type of cameras yet you have the Reolink set for 1080p and the Amcrest set for 4mp? I mean why down scale the Reolink.

Also I am sorry but if the left picture as you said is the Reolink and the right is Amcrest the Amcrest has a Much cleaner Image.

Next issue is VBR is very bad and even worse with your settings not to mention you don't say what Bit Rate your running them at.

For best results you would want to change the h265 to h264h, Also want to use CBR, 15 to 18FPS with a bit rate of no less then 4096.

Also I am sorry to say the scene is to busy. The camera is at a poor level and facing at the wrong area of interest. You have a beautiful home and loads of nice things but a camera that is on the other side of the room and being made to work 10x harder then it should be with low frame rates capturing both in a dark room and very bright outdoors is a lot of data for a camera to process.

Then if your E1 is the E1 I think it is then that is kind of an unfair side by side seeing the e1 I know is a Optical Zoom with focus ability where the 1041 is a 4mp pan tilt with static lens. Means that has no focus and is a what you see is what you get kind of view.. So sure a camera with the ability to focus past the local area is better then a static focus camera. Again the indoor camera shouldn't be trying to work double duty and the Area of Interest should be in the room that it is mounted in. Not trying to push past to the outdoors.

Hi there,

Thanks for the response!

I was only testing in this location, this is not the place where the cameras will ultimately end up. I didn't think the Reolink has optical zoom, so I thought they were pretty equivalent other than the Reolink uses 2.4/5GHz whereas the Amcrest uses only 2.4GHz. This is a link to the Reolink:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RS ... =UTF8&th=1

The reason I left the Reolink at 1080p was because that's the way it came in to Surveillance Station and worked pretty well. The Amcrest came in at VGA resolution, so it had me checking both the camera output and adjusting the Surveillance Station input.

I did find one major selection that I believe resolved the problem. Live View in Surveillance Station has a selection between "High Performance" and "High Quality". It was set to "High Performance", and once I switched it to "High Quality", the Amcrest image tightened up.

Here they are again both at 1080p, with the performance/quality selection set to High Quality". The difference in readability of the text is the indicator. Reolink left, Amcrest right:

[Revo2Maxx]

Aww I see, I have a Friend with the same camera however it is an E1 Zoom.. geez hate it when people do that lol same name for many different platforms..

Picture does look 100% better now. Just keep in mind that is a lot of work for a camera that that location trying to work crazy hard to pull bright though a dark room. Also at night if cameras go into IR mode there will be some lower quality images do to reflections off the leaves and pot that is close to the cameras lens.