Well, I finally had some time to hook up the new Dahua WizColor HDW2449TH-S-PROX ("ProX") camera, and compare it with the previous generation Dahua WizColor HDW2449T-S-PRO ("Color4M-TL") camera. Results are...very disappointing. There are several significant incremental improvements, and many regressions. Here are my first impressions:
PROs (ProX does better):
PROs (ProX does better):
- Noticeably more sensitive to light. I would estimate it is twice as sensitive, pulling in significantly more details at night in the country with the LED on minimum brightness (this helps with the live preview, and should help with quicker/more accurate triggers without requiring the LED to be as bright all the time). Optics (going from F1.0 to F0.8) should account for 1.5x, so there appears to have been a sensor improvement as well.
- Slightly less streaking/motion blur in low light.
- Slightly less noise/grain in low light.
- Handles glare (e.g. headlights on a car) better at night (less blooming/lens flare).
- Clearer image out of the box; 2D-NR no longer globally lowers the camera's fine-detail resolution (even during daytime), but applies smoothing to similarly colored areas as expected, with little effect during the day. (However, note that the Color4M-TL can be adjusted to exceed this camera's clarity by manually dropping 2D-NR from 50 to 25 and running it at its native 1440p mode instead of the interpolated 1520p mode.)
- I like the smaller OSD font, particularly on the sub stream (Color4M-TL could not be made small enough, even with CGI commands).
- The ProX camera has the buggiest firmware I've seen from Dahua in years (I'm running 4.R built 2026-04-24, the latest at this time). Interestingly, the firmware file for this camera is half as large as the previous generation (50 MB vs 91 MB), and is shared with the IL-series cameras. One bug causes it to randomly get stuck in a faulty exposure mode where the AI/NR is processing for a totally different gain/shutter combination, resulting in a very noisy, weirdly pulsing picture. This seems to happen frequently when manually allowing the shutter to increase past 33ms at night (Auto usually extends it to 83ms without this happening).
- Running in VBR mode (H.264 or H.265), I'm frequently getting corrupt frames, missing keyframes, and even occasionally stream freezes where Blue Iris has to reconnect after several seconds. Seems to happen most when there are rapid scene changes that cause the encoder to exceed its maximum bitrate (I saw it pushing 9600kbps in Blue Iris despite having a rated maximum bitrate of 6144kbps). Lowering the quality helps, but then I get unwanted compression artifacts. This is the first Dahua camera where I have experienced this behavior. No, the connections/ping is solid; the camera is just making mistakes, and switching to CBR makes it stop (although it also increases compression artifacts when there's lots of movement, and adds noticeable pulsing artifacts). I suspect it's encountering a buffer overflow and truncating frame data. IMHO, the encoder can obviously do it, so the maximum bitrate should be increased to 8192 at least, and the buffer made larger so when the encoder briefly surges past the maximum (on a scene or keyframe), the stream doesn't get truncated, causing image corruption.
- The built-in LED is cool white, not warm white—the first Dahua camera I've seen like this. Worse yet, it's about 1/3rd as bright! This makes the camera perform similar to the previous generation when it comes to motion blur at night with moving persons, despite noticeable improvements in optics/sensor—very disappointing.
- Like its predecessor, it has a garishly oversharpened image out of the box—but worse, now it cannot be fixed! I drop Sharpness to 20 on the Color4M-TL, but this one I have at 0 and it needs to be able to go to about -200. The Sharpness slider barely does anything on this camera! The oversharpening results in quite a bit of shiny "speckle" noise in some scenes at night, and a flat embossed looking image during the day—very disappointing.
- Picture is even brighter at night by default (it was already too bright). Same workaround (enabling License Plate overexposure correction) darkens the nighttime image a little, but it is no longer satisfactory. This camera is so addicted to a bright picture that reducing Exposure Compensation from 50 to 40 results in a better picture around the clock—but it's still too bright at night, and going lower makes it too dark/flat during the day.
- Harsher, less refined nighttime image. In addition to having a cool white LED, it seems to prefer a colder white balance too (Auto or Outdoor), and selecting Natural results in an overly orange nighttime image. It needs something in between! (Perhaps adjust the Outdoor profile a bit warmer, as it and Auto appear to be identical currently?) During the day, Auto, Outdoor, and Natural all appear about the same and are fine. It's just too cold (blue) at night—even when using the Color4M-TL warm white LED.
- Lower resolving power/clarity than the previous generation (Color4M-TL, after being correctly adjusted). I cannot tell if this is due to the out-of-control oversharpening or not, but the resolution of this camera while higher out of the box, is lower than the previous generation after proper adjustment. Dropping Sharpness and 2D-NR (which resolved this on the Color4M-TL) does not help at all on the ProX.
- Audio quality has been degraded, and is now similar to the Color4K and Color4M-TiOC series cameras, where there is an additional noise reduction algorithm garbling the audio that cannot be turned off. By comparison, the previous generation (Color4M-TL) has good audio quality just like the 5442 series cameras.
- License Plate overexposure correction is much more subtle and no longer flashes the image to a dark blue when it sees a moving car. However, it no longer makes license plates readable either! The darkening effect doesn't need to be as strong as before, but twice as much as it is now would probably be about right. This wouldn't be such a problem if the camera wasn't pushing the image so excessively bright at night...
- The ProX doesn't support sending a command in response to motion (only "Record", "Take snapshot", "Send email"). All the Dahua cameras that I've played with that have the new UI firmware support it, until this one. I stopped using ONVIF triggers where possible because the command method was faster and more reliable. This camera doesn't support it.
- The ProX is the first Dahua camera I've seen in a long time that doesn't use ONVIF profile "00000". If swapping this camera into an existing Blue Iris camera window, you'll have to manually change the ONVIF profile to "VideoSource000" before ONVIF triggers will work (frustratingly, Blue Iris will still successfully pull the ONVIF events and show them to the user in the Config window, but will silently ignore them, failing to trigger the camera until this is set correctly).
- No 6mm lens variant, even in the bullet camera form factor.
- I don't the new, larger turret form-factor, particularly all the wasted space with that ring at the bottom.
- When the LED is set to manual mode (e.g. to get the full, actual 100% brightness), License Plate overexposure correction takes no effect, even though it is selected and turned on.
- In auto mode, when set to 100%, the built-in LED is limited to about 40% of its actual maximum brightness (as revealed in manual mode). This worsens the camera's low light motion performance. Perhaps they're trying to save the LED from premature wear; this wouldn't be such a big deal if my points above and below this one were corrected.
- On the dual color cameras (IR+white), LED Smart Illumination mode switches the camera from IR mode to color when the selection motion is detected. On these white LED cameras, the option is there, but it is useless—no different from Auto mode. It needs to enable the white LED at low brightness (following the slider, like it currently does); but when motion is detected, it needs to rapidly fade the white LED to actual 100% (same as manual 100%) brightness so the camera can capture with minimal motion blur. Even better if this tied in to Auto exposure mode, instantly capping exposure to 20-25ms and gain to 50 while in a motion-activated state, and then releasing the exposure caps and slowly fading the LED back to the user-set slider value after the motion timeout has elapsed.
- Lens Distortion Correction significantly degrades the image quality on these cameras (distorts the image and reduces FOV too) and should be turned off by default.
- Audio sample rate is limited to 16kHz. It should be 24 or 48kHz. It should also support the Opus audio codec at 64kbps.
- H.265 AI coding is useless. I love how it "freezes" areas of the image that don't feature movement, significantly cutting back the continuous bitrate, but it's WAAAY too aggresive to be used in any serious manner (introduces serious compression artifacts even in areas of interest) and lacks any sort of adjustment options.
- No 6mm lens variant. This is so important I don't care if the 6mm lens has to go up from F0.8 or F1.0 to F1.0 or F1.2. We need these cameras in a 6mm variant; this is non-negotiable!
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