Tiandy’s TC-C34UP Colour Maker 4MP bullet camera arrived at SEN courtesy of the team at NAS Australia. This is a compact bullet camera weighing 900g, with a metal housing and an IP67 (submersible) rating.
The camera has a strong resolution of 2560 x 1440 at 25fps. Given the camera’s fast fixed lens, I’m interested to see image quality, low light performance and to get a sense of how it stacks up against the Tiandy TC-C32GP 2MP we tested last year.
The tidy specification has a couple of highlights, including the integrated warm white lights, which I rate highly in an affordable surveillance cameras. There’s 120dB of WDR, a claimed 0.0002 lux minimum scene illumination from the 1/1.8th inch CMOS sensor and down to 0 lux with the integrated warm white lights activated. The fixed lens is 4mm, giving a 92-degree horizontal angle of view (beaut for the street), and that aperture is very fast at F1.0.
As soon as I powered the camera up in the office, I got a strong sense of performance. I’d gone in and activated WDR but later on I started turning it off and on depending on my scene. Something I liked was that the setting tweaks made noticeable improvements without completely altering the look of the image – installers will know exactly what I mean. The colour rendition is good – slightly muted with WDR activated.
Resolution is good. A fixed mid-lens of 4mm with a 4MP resolution is always going to do well when it comes to resolution in the real world and so it proved to be. Focus is sharp from edge to edge, and from close in all the way through this internal scene – that’s about 8m from the lens. Looking at the images, focus looks like it goes on into the kitchen, another 3 metres, but there’s some backlight there confusing things.
With the camera hanging over the front balcony the sense of performance is enhanced. The combination of mid-length lens and mid-high resolution makes this little Tiandy bullet more than the sum of its parts. In a scene this deep – 90 metres down across Albion St, you burrow into pixel spread from around 20 metres. Within that distance, performance is very pleasing with faces and plates, and deeper into the image, I still have solid situational awareness.
Don’t miss the full review in SEN’s October issue!
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