ZTE's Xiaoxing looks at the smart camera. Its most obvious feature is that it has its own PTZ. After Lenovo Kanbao cancelled the PTZ, it became the only big factory with PTZ in China. Nearly a year later, ZTE released the page of Xiaoxing Check Pro on the JD crowdfunding.
The upgraded version of the machine is mainly aimed at improving the image quality, raising the resolution to 1080P at one fell swoop, adopting a 1/2.7 inch 2.07 megapixel (1080P) large bottom sensor, and upgrading the aperture to f/2.2. In addition to prime numbers, these parameters have even exceeded those of many mobile phones, but what will its actual performance be? How much can 1080P sensor for smart camera be improved?
Appearance and workmanship
The style of carton packaging continues the style of Xiaoxing, with product features and parameter descriptions on the side and simple manufacturer information on the bottom.
Accessories include fixing base and its screws, power supply, manual warranty, and a warning sticker.
The machine can be fixed on the wall or ceiling at different angles with the base. However, fixing the base itself needs to be used in conjunction with the wall screws. The official did not provide a common 3M glue fixing method.
5V/1.5A power supply. The power cord is nearly two meters long. It also uses the micro USB interface and can be used by mobile phones. This is worthy of praise.
Xiaoxing looks at the appearance of the Pro and Xiaoxing looks at it. The main change is that the original blue trim strip has turned to gold... It is still a cute round design, with all interfaces and antennas on the back, and speakers on both sides of the camera axis.
There is a circle of infrared lights around the camera, and the effective night vision distance of the official logo is 10m.
The back provides the reset button, warning interface, WPS quick link, micro SD card slot, RJ45 network cable interface and micro USB power interface.
Dense heat dissipation holes are opened above the base, and a large area of heat dissipation grille is located below the base, and the two-dimensional code of the body and simple parameters are pasted.
Operation and use
The so-called smart camera is nothing more than the addition of two functions: app/web page remote viewing and web storage, so it is difficult to open the gap in terms of functions.
In terms of app, Xiaoxing looks at Pro, which provides Android and iOS clients. The wireless connection method is similar to that of conventional smart cameras. After entering the wifi password to be accessed, the machine can automatically connect. However, some irony is that it is more convenient to connect with the network cable: connect with the route through the network cable interface, and the machine can start working without any settings.
Its app is one of the few smart camera applications that follow Android standards, and its interface uses a large number of left and right sliding elements. The app also rarely provides gesture passwords, which is more considerate.
In terms of conventional functions, "mobile monitoring warning, automatic recording and capturing, automatic infrared mode, two-way voice speaking" and other functions are available. Voice intercom has also been shaped like WeChat voice, and the use experience is OK, but this function is more of a publicity stunt, which is rarely used in practice.
There are two rare functions:
Real time picture acquisition function, like microblogging, can get real-time screenshots from the drop-down interface (perhaps to take care of users with slow network speed or low traffic).
LAN TF card content reading function: In the LAN, the app can read the TF card content in the machine, which can save the trouble of exporting with the computer. Unfortunately, the machine does not provide remote access.
ZTE's cloud storage service was just launched in May, nearly a year later than Lenovo, fluorite and other large manufacturers, and did not give away the experience time (generally, manufacturers will have three months of free cloud storage experience). Fortunately, ZTE's cloud service is nearly 50% cheaper than other large manufacturers.
Remote management
LAN management
In terms of web page management, the machine provides remote and LAN access:
The former can view real-time videos and control the movement of PTZ by visiting the web page and logging in to the account, but you have to pay for historical videos;
The LAN web side (similar to the access router management page) is a full blooded version, which can set the picture and video clarity, mobile monitoring orientation and sensitivity in great detail.
In addition, there is a funny usage for this smart camera using the mirco USB interface: use the mobile power supply, and then use the mobile phone's 3/4G network to send the network, so that you can easily use the sports camera or live video camera outdoors
functional testing
On the left is the 13 million pixel mobile phone sample, and on the right is Xiaoxing's PRO sample
The infrared night vision distance of the official logo is 10m, while the farthest distance of the test sample (scaled) above is about 5m. After the infrared light is added, the camera and mobile phone are not the same level competitors. In addition, it is also found that the infrared fill light is completely meaningless to the mobile phone camera (the mobile phone is just above the camera with the infrared fill light turned on, but the samples are still black).
In terms of local and cloud storage, the machine supports a 32G micro SD (TF) card at most, but like a sports camera, the machine cannot recognize the common 4-speed card, and at least a 10 speed micro SD card is required to work properly.
In terms of storage space occupation, when the machine is in high-definition mode, the 15s video recorded is only about 600K. According to this size, the 32G card can store about 10 days of local video data.
Mobile PTZ, cool functions, but poor experience
The biggest selling point of ZTE Pro is the mobile PTZ and 1080P HD image quality, so their performance is the focus of our evaluation.
In terms of control, corresponding to the mobile PTZ function, the most obvious feature of its APP is the addition of a direction control button, which controls the direction of the camera by short or long press of the direction button. Although the dual finger zoom function of similar products is missing, the machine rotation angle can be controlled by sliding up, down, left and right on the screen, which is very considerate.
In addition, the machine supports the automatic cruise mode. You can set the up and down or left and right cruise modes. The two modes can even overlap, but they can only cruise once. This directly causes this function to be useless
The maximum movement angle of the machine is about 85 degrees, the minimum is about 45-50 degrees, and the left and right can move to nearly 170 degrees respectively, except for the right rear, almost all can be photographed.
The transmission speed of the machine is not fast, so it is unrealistic to make it stare at fast moving objects. Moreover, the "moving object tracking function" of the first generation Xiaoxing Watch has been canceled. Although this function is used less frequently, it is a pity that there is a cool function missing.
In addition, because the screen will have a network transmission delay of about 2 seconds, it will take 1-2 seconds to see the screen changes after clicking the direction button. In addition, in this version of firmware, the direction buttons occasionally stick, and the direction control accidentally turns too far. The experience is not very good.
1080P HD
Due to the limited domestic network speed, the resolution of mainstream surveillance and smart cameras is still 720P (1280 * 720). Among smart cameras, Xiaoxing Kankan Pro is one of the first 1080P products in the industry, and its camera specifications are also quite outrageous: 1/2.7 inch 2 million pixels (the mainstream is 1/4 inch 920000 pixel sensor) and f/2.2 aperture.
This CMOS sensor is a large part larger than the IMX214 (1/3.06 inch) sensor of the mainstream flagship mobile phone, and the pixel size is only 2 million, which is a large part larger than the unit pixel size. Theoretically, the weak light performance will be much better. In addition, it is officially announced that WDR digital wide dynamic technology (double exposure of shadows under backlight) is used to cope with scenes with larger light difference.
Corresponding to 1080P resolution, app provides 2x and 4x digital zoom function and manual brightness control function. The video stream definition provides four options, and their corresponding network speeds are as follows:
Normal (320 * 180 resolution) 25-40k/s
Medium (480 * 270 resolution) 50-60k/s
Clear (1280 * 720 resolution) 80-100k/s
High definition (1920 * 1080 resolution) 130-180k/s
Because it is a dynamic bit rate adjustment, different picture light and shade distribution and picture changes of different amplitude will have a significant impact on its bandwidth/network speed occupation. But in fact, the common 4M telecom broadband (theoretical extreme speed of 512k/s) can support the 1080P video stream.
The picture quality is improved, but the range is not as expected
First, compare the four different definitions of the machine. The definition has changed from 720P to 720P, while the image sharpness of 1080P is much higher than that of 720P. The back of the display and the left mouse box are rich in details, and the eyes of the toy "Yamaji" can also see it. Although the picture quality is better, the change is not as obvious as that from "normal" to "medium" and from "medium" to "clear".
For comparison, we used two devices with Sony IMX135 sensor, the leftmost LG GFlex2 (1920 * 1080 pixel photo) and the rightmost Xiaomi 2s (1600 * 1200 pixels) for comparison. You can refer to the size of the table in the sample sheet. The small interest in the middle is that the wide angle range of the Pro is much larger, resulting in a much smaller area allocated to the table in the sample sheet of similar size.
After zooming out the sample sheet, Xiao Xing saw that there were obvious sharpening marks on the Pro screen, with a clear sense of grain, which was close to Xiaomi 2s in discrimination, but still weaker than GFlex2. However, considering that Xiaoxing has a larger wide-angle view (resulting in a smaller scene in the proof and a larger magnification), it is gratifying to see this performance.
Compared with the smart cameras of the same generation, Xiaoxing Kankan Pro is in the middle, and two other domestic 720P smart cameras of 400 yuan are on both sides.
The leftmost one is directly abused; The image of the 720P camera on the far right has been sharpened strongly. The text on the mouse box on the left has appeared particles after excessive sharpening, but the details are even close to the 1080P Xiaoxing Look at Pro, and the dynamic range is also better; However, if we really talk about the details of the picture, the 1080P Xiaoxing Pro should be more abundant (the shutter on the back).
On the left side is the sample at about 10 a.m., on the right side is the sample at about 8 p.m. The light on the right side is much weaker, and the ISO in the sample on the right side is obviously much higher (the machine screenshot cannot display EXIF information). The loss of details is also more serious than that in the morning, but a lot of picture details are still retained. When the infrared mode is not turned on, the large size CMOS still brings much better weak light performance than expected.
summary
In terms of the use experience and appearance, the new generation of Xiaoxing has little difference between Pro and Xiaoxing. However, the image quality focused on promotion has indeed improved significantly, and the big bottom CMOS has indeed improved the weak light imaging to a certain extent.
However, it is a pity that even with 1080P CMOS, its performance does not leave the 720P camera with excellent algorithm bonus. In the field of smart cameras, the story of "Apple's 8 million hit China's 20 million in a thousand years" has been repeated However, considering that Xiaoxing's Pro has maintained the price of 499 yuan of the previous generation, this picture quality improvement is more conscientious.
The final purchase suggestion is that if you are a user of Xiaoxing and do not have high requirements for image quality, you are not recommended to upgrade. After all, there is little difference between other function points of the two machines; If the network speed is limited but the high-definition image quality is required, it is recommended to use the 720P products of a large manufacturer. After all, the image quality of these products is very close to that of the domestic 1080P scheme, and they also save bandwidth; If you need mobile PTZ and high-definition image quality, Xiaoxing has seen that Pro is the only choice in big factories
fabulous:
Step on:
Network cloud storage is not sent
High definition image quality consumes high network speed and bandwidth
The use experience of PTZ needs to be improved
