Bosch has been in the game a long time for a tech company: they were founded in 1886 near Stuttgart, Germany. What does this long experience give them? Unbeatable engineering chops.
Take Bosch starlight, which is their name for an IP security camera that takes color surveillance video even in incredibly dark circumstances. They released the first starlight camera in 2012, and the technology has only gotten better since then. There are no tricks: just unbeatable engineering.
Bosch Starlight
Bosch starlight combines a highly sensitive sensor with advanced noise reduction technology to produce color video in light levels as low as 0.00825.
How dark is that? It’s roughly as dark as a moonless night with a clear sky. There’s a reason they called it “starlight.” And Bosch starlight cameras give you color video in that!
Imagine taking a selfie with no flash on a night like that: you’d just get black. Why would you just get black? Your smartphone’s camera’s sensor isn’t sensitive enough to pick up on the light. Bosch starlight sensors, however, are sensitive enough to pick up the light.
This means that they can be true day/night security cameras without resorting to infrared or thermal imaging. Yes, those two techniques can produce video in complete blackness, but their limitations are readily known once you see the video they produce. You get monochrome video lacking a huge amount of detail.
If you can get it, color video is preferable. Imagine not knowing if a suspect is wearing a tan or a light green or a pink shirt? In monochrome, they might appear the same, because you lack any information about the hue of the shirts.
Color Video In the Dark
Color video makes it simple to tell what color a shirt is, because you get information about hues. Hue is simply the term for a basic color: it’s the difference between red and blue as determined by color spectrums. When you say something is “black-and-white” or “monochrome,” you really mean that only one hue or color is present: you’re just making that hue darker or lighter.
So Bosch starlight cameras give you color video in almost complete darkness. Are they too sensitive? Not at all.
They have amazing dynamic ranges up to 120 dB. Dynamic range, in this case, indicates how much information the sensor can record between not capturing any light at all (giving you a pure black picture) and capturing more light than the sensor can handle (giving you a pure white picture). 120 dB is, take it from us, an enormous dynamic range, giving you a very wide spectrum between the darkest parts of the picture and the brightest.
This means that Bosch cameras give you all the visual evidence that could be lost in low-light situations, while dealing with very bright scenes. And they do it all at once. At up to 60 frames per second. With an image resolution of up to 5 Megapixels. (For comparison, 1080p video is just 2 MP.) While offering data analytics, applied at the point of capture, to help you find and manage critical information.
As we said: no tricks, just great engineering.