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question about security camera performance

Can anybody direct me to some good information to compare camera specifications ? For example many cameras will give you a lux rating and say it will work down to 1.0 lux light or 0.5 lux light, but I haven't been able to discern what that means in the real world. I've found the technical definitions of lux, foot-candles, etc, but have a hard time seeing what that means in the real world. Will a 1.0 lux B&W camera show anything on a moonlit night ? Moonless night ? Also how do you convert the lens size to a magnification power or angular field of view ? Things like that.

I would appreciate any pointers to info about camera performance and optics for the embedded engineer layman.

Reply to
Eagle Eye
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You don't. Those have nothing to do with each other. The size of the lense governs only the sensitivity (basically: the larger the front hole, the more light your camera collects --> the more sensitive it'll be).

Cameras don't have "magnifications", anyway.

As to what a Lux means:

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--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Broeker

Many CCD cameras are sensitive to infrared. You can make an extremely bright illuminator using some IR LEDs that will be invisible to the human eye. Many "baby-cams" have them built-in.

--Gene

Reply to
Gene S. Berkowitz

The lens "size" is an indication of magnification as used in the photographic world. a 50mm lens does not imply that the diameter of the lense is 50mm. In the 35mm SLR world it implies a magnification of x1. The F-stop of a lense gives an indication of the physical size. i.e a 50mm lense with an F stop of 1.4 will have more light gathering power than a 50mm lens with an F stop of 4.

A camera is a sensor with an element to focus the image onto the sensor. A CCD sensor alone is NOT a camera.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Reply to
Anton Erasmus

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