Hikvision Mini PTZ Limits

1. Panning Right & Left
2. Tilting Up & Down
3. Optical Zoom
4. Digital Zoom
5. Pan, Tilt and Zoom Maximum and Minimum speeds

For this first test, remember that the camera does not spin (or pan) 360 degrees.  There is a stop point and 350 degrees.  That stop point is located here, where I have written the word “back”. I’m showing you this because you don’t want this stop point near your surveillance area.  Keep this against a wall, or a post otherwise you will be frustrated having to swing the camera all the way around to see the other side.

Here’s how it looks with the dome off.  Back and forth, back and forth.

Let’s look outside and pan all the way to the right.  The Tilt is 20 here to avoid seeing base of the camera in the shot because we are at a zoom of 0.  Now we’ll pan all the way to the left.  Here is a screenshot comparing both extremities and how much you’d be missing.

For this test, we’ll start the camera with a tilt of 0. It’s normal to see the base of the camera here at the top of the screen.  If we were zoomed in, the base would no longer be in the shot.  He’s how it looks with the dome removed.  Here outside, we’ll go from the lowest tilt is 0, and we’ll go right to its highest, which is 90 degrees.

For the optical zoom test, I’ll zoom in as far as the camera optics will let me, which is 4x.  This is similar to the comparing a 2.8mm lens all the way up to a 12mm lens.

Digital zoom is not mechanical and no optics are moving.  It’s simply taking the existing image and cropping it.  To set your camera up for this, you need to go into the camera setup on the live view page.  Chick the menu button and navigate to digital zoom and the maximum value I can set this for is 64.  So, let’s test that out….  you can definitely see the pixilation at this level.  I normally don’t use digital zoom because it doesn’t really buy me any real zooming, and kind of a silly feature to go all the way to 64, since the quality sucks at that range.

The speed at which the camera pans, tilts and zooms if configurable, so let’s look at how to do that and test it out.  Here on the Configuration.PTZ.Basic Setting.Basic Parameter.Manual Control Speed=Auto). Zoom speed settings are just below under “Zooming Speed”
Let’s go through each of these and time them to see how long it takes them to go from one extreme to the next.
I’ll also try panning and tilting at the optical zoom setting of 4 to see if they are the same as 0. I would expect the pan and tilt actions to be slower while zoomed in so the world doesn’t pass by too fast and you get confused to what you are looking at.

First if all, the “Compatible” setting.  The full pan at 0 zoom takes 19 seconds, and the full tilting action takes 9.  When zoomed in to 4X, the times are just about double at 38 and 22.  Here is a look at the other 4 modes.  We’ll do the exact same scenario with all 4 modes at the same time on the screen.  In the upper let we have Pedestrian, then Non-motor Vehicle, Motor Vehicle and finally Auto.

These are equally fast forwarded.  Let’s compare the full 0-350 pan at 0 zoom.

Now the 0-90 tilt at 0 zoom.  Next the 0-350 pan at 4X zoom.  Finally the 0-90 tilt at 4X zoom.  Here is a look at the results.

Not bad.  3 seconds to zoom in from 2.8mm to 12mm is pretty good.  I think I’ll keep this setting on 3.