Advice on plastic sheeting that is IR compatible.

Comments

• guykuo

  April 2018

  You're not going to have good luck finding a suitable material. The IR will back reflect enough to fog your image no matter the material selected. The only way the enclosures work (with varying effectiveness) is to keep the IR baffled away from the lens.
  
  Your best course is to disable the camera's onboard IR and place an IR illuminator on the other side of your shield and some distance away from the camera.
• chubsta

  April 2018

  Thanks for the reply - that is a shame, my main use would be inside an enclosure that I use for feeding wild hedgehogs, I would like to be able to position the food bowls so that they are closer to the camera so that the hogs would be facing the camera when feeding, at the moment I just capture crystal clear 4k video of hedgehog bums as they feed, which is interesting enough but not really what I would prefer.
  
  Unfortunately if I just move the bowls nearer the hogs still manage to sit between the camera and bowl so I am no better off, I need some way of putting the bowls up against something that the hogs can't get around and which won't block the view or reflect back - a separate ir source would be difficult as I would have to run a wire to power it. I don't want to have any sort of wire netting or similar in there as although it would probably do the job hedgehogs are notorious for getting caught in such stuff and I just wouldn't want to risk it.
  
  While I am on the question of IR - I need extra illumination in my garden, any recommendations on a light source that would be suitable for Reolink cameras, I believe such lamps come in different wavelengths so wouldn't want to buy an unsuitable one...
• guykuo

  April 2018

  Look for an 850 nm IR illuminator. They run from $30 to $80 on Amazon depending on how much output you want. The longer wavelength 920 nm illuminators are completely invisible to humans (no visible red glow when stared directly), but are FAR less efficient for lighting things up. The cameras we're using for security are typically sensitive to 850 nm IR, but not so good at 920 nm.
  
  
• Ben

  April 2018

  To avoid reflections, you would need to use some kind of gasket/ring around the lens (e.g. black rubber) to make sure there is no route for the IR light to reflect off the material back to the lens. Or, it may be easier to cut a hole in the perspex and poke the whole the camera through slightly - you'd get better quality video this way anyway, as it avoids the extra layer of perspex.
• chubsta

  April 2018

  Thanks very much, will get an 850nm illuminator, and will have to just pout up with staring at hedgehogs from the back end!
• camguyfbr

  April 2018

  Hi chubsta - your problem here will be that there's no way of disabling the on-board IR LEDs on many ReoLink products (including the 410), so you can't have the IR cut filter disabled ("night vision black & white mode") without having glare from the on-board LEDs.
  
  On many cams you can deselect the built-in illuminator to enable a 3rd party floodlight, while still using full sensitivity night mode. I use a 920nm LED panel illuminator for one of our cams and it is inefficient compared with an 850nm (judging by the fact that it gets warm)... but it has a dawn/dusk switch and is invisible so still works for me.
• guykuo

  April 2018

  It the reolinks are built like other cameras, the IR LED's may be on a separate PCB whose connector can be unplugged. That would disable the internal IR LED's. Would require opening the camera to do it.