If you’re in the market for a security system, you’ve probably heard of both Uniview and Dahua. These are two of the biggest manufacturers in the CCTV industry.
In this article, we’ll be comparing the image quality between the Uniview IPC3618SR3-ADF28KM-G and the Dahua N81CJ02. These 8MP turret cameras are very similar in terms of pricing and features, so how does their image quality compare?
Watch the video below, or continue scrolling down for image comparisons!
License Plate & People Recognition (Daytime)
We installed both cameras at the back of our office, and left them on default settings other than bitrate, which was set to 8192 Kbps. Then, I stood at distances between 10 – 50ft (3-15m) away from the cameras while holding up a license plate.
From the tests in the daytime, we found both cameras were very sharp, and had no difficulty reading the license plate at distances up to 50ft. The Dahua camera seemed to resolve details sligtly better too, at the cost of worse colour accuracy.
General Image Quality (Nighttime)
Next, we have a shot of a car driving across our parking lot at nighttime. This gives us a good idea for how both cameras perform in a low-light environment.
You can drag in the middle to swipe between the Uniview on the left, and Dahua on the right side of the image.
License Plate & People Recognition (Nighttime)
Lastly, we repeated the license plate test during the night. This allows us to compare how both cameras perform during low-light scenes, especially in terms of face recognition and license plate detection.
Both cameras have had WDR enabled during this test, because otherwise the license plate was simply an overexposed white blur. Also, both we set to a minimum shutter speed of 1/30s, which allowed us to fairly compare the image between the two cameras without any special slow shutter settings.
Here, we found the Dahua camera performed slightly better reading license plates at nighttime. This is especially noticeable from 40ft onwards.
Final Thoughts
I hope this article made it easier to compare the similarities and differences between Uniview and Dahua 8MP turret cameras. Keep in mind, we only tested two specific camera models in this article.
You cannot generalize the results to the companies as a whole. Different cameras from Uniview and Dahua will perform differently to the two we tested here.
Be sure to view our comparison between the Uniview & Hikvision 4MP camera too! If you need to purchase security cameras for your home or business, you can contact us for more information.
