Unifi G5 Bullet vs. AI Bullet | Security Camera Comparison
Hey, everybody. Clay Archer, CEO, DPC Technology. Today we're going to jump into the differences between the AI bullet and the G5 bullet.
We're going to compare all the little quirks and features between the two of them. We'll fire up the software, take a look at them. Inside the software will pixel peep.
See what your image looks better. We'll look at it at night. We'll look at the day. And then we'll decide which ones work, where and when, and what might be best use case for you in your setup. So let's jump right into the specs.
If you saw my video last week where I compared the AI Pro to the G5 Pro, the story is the same here. These cameras are more similar than they are different. So right off the bat, the bullet is 399 and the G5 bullet is 129. And this is a huge difference in price. You know, obviously it's more than double. So what are the features and benefits that are a change to make that worth it? So let's let's dive a little bit deeper and see if we can figure it out in the in the features here.
So they both have a five megapixel sensor. The G5 bullet says it's HDR and the AI bullet says it's not. But in fact the AI bullet is a HDR sensor as well. They both have fixed focal lengths to my eye. The AI bullet is a little bit narrower field field of view than the G5 bullet. But you can see their specs there.
The AI bullet has a detection ring. And the G5 bullet has an IR led. We'll see how those will work at night. And then most everything else about the camera is almost identical. The AI bullet does have one gigabit per second connectivity where the G5 bullet has 100 megabits per second. Like I said in my previous comparison to the AI Pro to the G5 Pro, that makes no difference in practical use.
So I call that a wash. The AI bullet does have a quad core processor where the G5 bullet just has the dual core processor and the rest of the specs are so close that they're not even worth mentioning. The big feature that's, you know, obviously driving that huge price differential is the enhanced AI detections. The G5 bullet also did have some night and HDR improvements over the G4 bullet, but I shall see when we get into the cameras, I don't think that really has much to do with comparison between the two of these cameras. So really the big thing is going to be the A.I. detections.
But let's jump into the software real quick and see what these cameras look like during the day and we'll pixel peep a little bit and see if we can tell any differences between the two cameras. So you can see here, I've got the two cameras up top here. I've also got my G4 Ptz and a G4 dome that's out in the front.
So anyways, I'll take a quick look at the AI bullet and you can see right off the bat really nice image, pretty crisp image. I think anybody would be pretty doggone happy with this image and it is almost identical when we come over to the G5 bullet. One thing you will notice in the G5 bullet versus the AI bullet is if you can see pixel peep in here, you can see just the edge of a car on the edge of that frame here. That same edge of the car is on the frame here. But you'll see on this bluish car here that almost halfway through the passenger seat there and on the G5, I have got past that horror completely in a little bit over here so that I could have a little bit to do with the way I mounted the two cameras, but not really. I think most of that is going to be in the field of view there.
You just a degree at this width definitely makes a big difference. So kind of splitting hairs there, but it does give me a least the impression that is a little bit wider on the G5 bullet. One other thing that is very similar between the AI pro and the G5 Pro is it looks like that image is a little bit warmer. Now, I could go into the cameras and I'll show you in the cameras themselves. I can go in there in warm or cool this one down to make them match. But just out of out of the box.
This looks like a warmer image and you can see it in the grass where this grass looks a little bit more orangey and this looks a little bit more greeny. Same with the grass across the road. It just looks a little bit more just there's a little quality of the different. I will say that this image to my eye looks better and this is the G5, but the big feature difference between these two cameras, as you can see in this overlay, is, you know, people are walking through it.
It's identifying people. It's giving me the license plate here for this car. It's telling me that’s a sedan. And the detections are really where, you know, you're spending the money here on between these two cameras. This G5 bullet does not do that because it's only getting motion detections. It's not getting all of those smart detections.
Let's do this. Let's go into the cameras themselves real quick and we'll bring up the AI bullet and we will bring up the G5 bullet. I think one of the things that some people are going to want to do is see whether they want to replace a G5 bullet with an AI bullet. And if you were in that case, let me give you a little trick here. If you are looking at license plate detection, for example, and you wanted to know if I upgrade from the G5 bullet, am I going to be able to do license plate detections? Well, on this G5 bullet here, I can read this license plate.
Right. I'm zoomed in 400 on both of these images right here on the G5 bullet. I am able to see the image.
So if I can read it on the G5 bullet, I will be able to read it on the AI bullet and AI will work. So if you're wondering, hey, is this location right for license plate detection and you already have a guidebook, so pretty good comparison already. Or G5 Pro for that matter. If your eyeballs can see it, the AI is going to see it. And if your eyeballs can't see it, the AI is not going to see it.
Just a quick rule of thumb for AI detection. But, you know, while we're in this far, I will show you a couple of things that I think are kind of important to look at on the image quality. When I say important, I don't know how much of a decision based this would be, but you can see a couple of things here.
This fringing is purple. Fringing you see on the on the rims. It is much more pronounced this purple fringing into the light than it is on the G5.
Pro so the AI pro is worse than the G5 pro in that that comparison. I also say that just ever so slightly I think this license plate and of course I don't know how this is going to translate on to YouTube, but it's pretty obvious to me that this is a little bit crisper. It's a little bit sharper on the G5 bullet than it is on the AIbullet. Also, this is more saturated.
You can see the orange is on the Florida tab or orange and they are not on the AI bullet It also the Cadillac symbol. And I see that here on the on the G5 bullet and I do not see it on the AI bullet. You know, that may not be the biggest factor on whether or not you want to buy one camera over the other.
But I think the image quality on the G5 bullet is really good. And I think it is marginally, you know, when I say marginally, like that's how far have been there, I'm always been here. I think that that it looks better. And I would also say and I wish I was getting it here, but I'm not that the way it handles flares is better.
Like it's you know, that is a very, very harsh flare here. And I'm not getting any of that purple fringe on it. Unfortunately. It's just out of view here on the AI bullet.
But I think the image quality of the G5 bullet is a W just by a hair versus like margin. You can kind of see here the richness of the color of the white versus the white on here. It just looks a little bit more both of these look a little bit more washed out.
This red car looks a little bit more vivid. So let's get into the things that are going to be kind of probably more deciding factor for me. Obviously, the detections are amazing. I'm getting personal vehicle, animal, I am on early access release here, so I have face detection on here as well. But you know you're going to get those features and as they roll out new features, you are going to get them on the AI bullet, whereas you are not going to get them on the G5 bullet. Now, you know, at some point this will not be the latest, greatest camera on a bullet and they probably will not add more features to it as well.
But in the short term, in the foreseeable future, they are adding features pretty rapidly right now and they are all added to the AI bullet, which makes that, you know, a better purchase case scenario. That being said, though, the G5 bullet is the image quality I think is probably better. But let's jump into the detections because at the end of the day, I think detections are really where you are going to make this decision of whether the huge price difference is worth it for you or not. And there are some issues that the bullet has, and I'll go through them here in a second. So first of all, these are just the AI bullet, the G5 bullets. You see, they're both getting motion detections.
But if I go over here and I look at all detections here, I can select which cameras I've got the AI bullet and the G5 bullet. But now I have these other detections color of the vehicle, vehicle type by bus, motorcycle, SUV, city and truck van. Baby crying. Barking. Horn siren speaking.
License plate deduction. These are all huge features that the G5 bullet does not have and the AI bullet does have. So let's just go. Let's go. Every green vehicle. This is awesome, too. If the cop comes to your door and says, hey, you know, the next door neighbor was robbed and we think it was a green vehicle that happened last Tuesday, you'll be able to go back through all your footage and find every green vehicle.
And not only that, if they said it was a green SUV, let's say you can even whittle it down to just the green SUVs. This is a huge feature, especially when you have a ton of cameras out in a ton of vehicles going by. I really feel like these are the new killer features of this ecosystem and have them on The AI bullet really makes it a much more versatile piece of equipment. So I can go through and I can select each kind of vehicle, bike, bus, and it's just going to show me every detection that it's got. And these are you can see underneath his camera it's saying which carrier it is.
These are only happening for the AI bullet. So some of the audio stuff is pretty cool, too. I could go car horn, let's say, and I'll just go ahead and play one of these on speaker and you can hear the horn. You know how useful horn is. I don't know. You can say somebody said they pull up in the parking lot yesterday, and they honked their horn.
You can go back and look at all the horn ones. One of the things about siren and speaking, I will say I get a lot of false positives. You can see here's Jared and Andrew talking in the parking lot.
That's that's fine. And I can pick that up a little bit. But a lot of these are people shouting far, far away. And so a lot of them are not useful. So your mileage may be may vary. Obviously, my use case is so specific as is any test. Like if you're in a backyard somewhere and you want to hear anybody speaking, that probably is a super useful feature for you.
Not so much here because everybody walking to their car, I could hear them mumbling a little bit in the background, which is not so, so useful for me. One other thing is license plate detection. This is where the real caveat for me is with the AI bullet. You'll notice it does get license plate detections. This is the Cadillac that's parked there. My problem with the AI bullet is that this is about 20 feet from the camera here, maybe a 25 feet.
Where I want them to detect is over here where every vehicle leaving goes by. And it does not detect off. It is not going to detect this car over here.
It is not going to detect this car over here. And that's a little bit too far. I did a whole video on how to tune these cameras and position them for license plate detection.
But just know going into it that if you are doing license plate detections, that the AI bullet needs to be very close to where you're doing the detections and you need to funnel everything to it. So if it was on this pole facing this way, it would be the perfect camera for license plate detection. But if you're trying to do license plate detections, you need to know when and where it's going to work well and when it well, it's not going to work well. It is able to read license plates like you see there. But that was kind of served up on a silver platter to it. You'll see that, you know, it's been in this position now for several days.
It was. And this other position and in this other position, it did really well. It catching things going down the driveway, which was which is great. But it's a lot closer. This is more like that 20, 30 feet range.
As soon as I put it over here, you know, this is probably it's been over there for maybe a week. And you're seeing it's got, you know, one, two, three or four detections when there are, you know, probably 50 cars a day driving through there that it should detect. It also is picking up a lot of false detections this DHL and FedEx in the life south building your mileage may vary as far as license plates section goes with the bullet. The way to think about it is can I get close enough to the vehicle to really aim at the license plate? Because if you cannot see the license plate with zooming in on it, you cannot the AI I cannot detect it.
One thing that I will say about both cameras and I do get a question about this in the comments below, is both cameras do a really good job of being able to have detection zones. So I've got these different zones. I've got motion zones, smart detection zones, crossing lines and privacy zones. So, you know, a privacy zone, if I did not want anybody to record, let's just say in this zone like I did, you know, I did not want anybody in this lower right hand corner to be recorded. I can add a privacy zone there. And when people walk through that zone, it's not going to record them.
So if you know, you had a one in a kitchen or somewhere where you didn't want people to be like, you feel inappropriately recorded, I could do that. Then I could say that and it will not record in that zone. I can go add a crossing line, meaning if somebody goes across this line, it's going to start recording.
That is a and I can count the detections I could do, but I can do it in both directions. I can do it one direction and I can count the detections. I can do it for animal, person vehicle, really cool stuff.
Like I can really narrow this down if I'm getting way too many notifications that people are walking one way or the other, I can remove the line, I can change a lot, I can add another line, I can do all those things and then discard that as well. Here is smart detection zones. I can say where is it doing it in this one? Obviously, I probably don't need all these detections of the cars going by now because I can filter by smart detections. I'm not as sensitive to it now because I just go in there and I can find what I'm looking for. But I would probably do something like that if this was the final resting spot of this camera and I could add multiple ones of those and I can drag lines or put dots in between and, you know, really work this so that only things that were in this zone and however I wanted to do it and I can say the animal face person vehicle in their zones as well obviously faces early access and you might not have that in your version at the time of this. So so pretty cool stuff.
I wanted to bring that up just because, you know, some people go, I mean, I don't want to get detected all the time and I want thousands of detections. So when I go in on these videos and I show you all these detections, it's a little over the top because I've just got them completely unfiltered. So that pretty much does it for daylight. What we'll do is we'll wait for it here dark, and we'll jump in and review the cameras at nighttime. So. Right.
It's nighttime. It's a couple days later and haircut later. So you can see the two cameras. And we got up an AI Bullet and the G5 bullet.
Margaret’s pulling back in the car into that spot there just to kind of see if we're going to do any license plate detection with the AI bullet there and compare to that same spot that we can see better earlier in the day. You know, the both of the cameras just went from I.R. two to color because of the lights of the of the driver. We'll tell you that the AI bullet is much slower to turn back into I.R.
mode. It likes to go in in regular mode in my parking lot. You can see here that it is, I think, a little bit more sensitive to light here. It does a better job, honestly. I think that the camera looks a little bit better in regular mode than it does in IR mode, although and that's a really good IR image at night.
It looks really good there. I will say it is using mainly the light in the ambient light in the parking lot. Unfortunately, as I said in the pro comparison, we have relatively good lighting around my office and it's impossible for me to turn it all off because it's street lights and the people across the street, my neighbors, I have turned off the lighting in my parking lot. So this is just coming from the air emitters and the surrounding areas. In auto, though, I will tell you that the AI emitter from the AI bullet is not on this.
in infrared mode, but the air emitter from the G5 bullet is on. And you can see the in down in the lower right corner. You can see that it's lighting up the edge of the building.
I have this kind of in a spot where it can see the edge of the building. It's on a it's on a rig a little bit higher than the edge of the building. And you can see the edge of the building. So anyways, I wanted to come in here, just do that same comparison.
Can we read the license plates. It's pretty tight there, it’s margin call whether you can or can't there. Let's go into the 400% like we did during the day tough. I don't think I would say that's a no and let's see on the AI bullet and I'm going to say that's a no. Two it's close but let's do this Let's go into the cameras themselves and let's turn off IR We'll go with the bullet first.
We'll go into settings and we will go into custom, and then we will turn the trigger threshold all the way down to off. And let's go in there again and see if we can maybe read the license plate. Now, still on the edge. We'll see if we got a detection and detection here in a second.
And then let's go into the G5 bullet and do the same thing and bring it up. And we'll see if we can see him in there and see that license plate that we could clearly see quite easily during the day. The same test. We're going to go the custom and then we're going to drag our threshold to hold it off close, but not quiet on both of them.
I think that's a margin call on quality difference. I think there's a little bit more light in the AI. I yeah, there's definitely more light in the AI than there is in the just real in G5 bullet. But as far as sharpness and clarity- 03o something J, tthat’s getting really close. Really sorry about that. I didn't have that. I had them in auto and not in high quality. I think on the margin and again I said 03ERJ let's just see if we got the license plate detection here on that and all the license plates and see if the AI bullet got The license plate is close.
It did not get it there. You know, I really think that's a you know obviously the AI pro versus the AI bullet. I think the pro and it’s ability to zoom there is really its key killer feature let's say that that was a fail there. I mean it's really close. If I could get that a little bit closer, I think it could do it.
I, I could almost visually see it. They're just not quite there. Again, I think that image quality between these two images is close.
You're splitting hairs a little bit, but I'm going to give the win just in general. You can see it's just a little brighter. And I don't know how this looks on YouTube, but it's a little brighter. on the AI bullet, unfortunately, I can't really show you it in pitch black, but in normal mode, I think the AI bullet wins and let's go ahead and turn IR fully on on both of them.
You see there when I turn on the IR emitter, on the the AI bullet, you can see that that cobweb in front of it, which always is a little annoying to me, especially in well-lit area like this, that you don't really necessarily need it. So watch me, I'll turn that off and go IR filter only and boom it comes into focus quite a lot better at this distance too. You know I'm not seeing like look at the back of the car and I'll turn the filter back on. You can see it in the license plate. It gets a little bit more reflective and I think it'll probably be fair to let me turn off the one in the G5 bullet so you get a fair comparison. You can see there, when I turned it off, it clicked down a level of brightness there.
So now I'm going to go in the AI and I'll turn its filter on and off again. So this light, only light is getting it's from the the camera itself. So let me go back in here and honestly, with the filter, I can really read that license plate.
Now, I'm surprised that it's not picking that up, but watch. When I turn on the IR filter, You'll see it. Definitely. The license plate. That reflection almost makes it harder to read, but it does light up. It certainly does light up the area more. And and probably for a person detection that there would be better.
One thing I don't like about it is these cameras have only been up for a week in this location and it's already got a cobweb in front of it. So you can imagine that if it's been out there for a long, long time or if you're, you know, on the side of the house where you're not going to clear very often, cobwebs will get up there and it will make it a little bit annoying. You can do an IR emitter off of cap, off axis, off the camera like the floodlight. That would do a better job. But, you know, take it for what it's worth there that is with the IR on that is with the IR off. Definitely filling out.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot more light on it with the IR on and we'll do the same thing. Let's go over the G5 and do it on and off IR G5 bullet. In front will go on and we'll do it.
off. your mileage may vary there. You know, in this location where I have so much light, I really honestly feel like it does a better job. They both do a better job without the IR on in the same location. Just there, just for for giggles, I will tell you that the G4 ptz that I have out here is amazing with IR and you can I mean it is pretty crazy how bright its IR emitter is.
If I go use my mouse to move things around here, you will really see it. It lights up. I mean, it just lights up everything. But the IR emitters on the G4 PTZ are quite a bit stronger than they are on the others. So take that for what it's worth in this location, though, honestly, what I do with the cameras is I turn the IR off totally and I just put them into regular mode because I think it is the best looking for these cameras, especially I don't leave the G5 Bullet on the side of my building. I do leave the AI bullets on the side of the building all the time.
It's actually on the other side, facing back of the driveway, aiming back towards this building over here that's got a lot of light. And I really think this image is really pretty good. I can see colors. It's pretty vivid. That's it for night. There really isn't much more to these cameras.
But again, I think, you know, if you really want a pixel peep in there, they're pretty similar. I think the low light sensitivity of the AI bullet is a little superior to the G5 bullet, but, you know, again, that may just be personal taste. I just see more in the shadow here and of the car than I do in this shadow. All right. So live with that. We'll go back to daytime. I want to do a comparison of the sound. Then we'll wrap it up and I'll tell you which situation.
I think each camera is the best fit for. All right, We're back again. It's the next day and it's raining outside a little bit, but I've got the Daniel going out in front of the office to test the sound. I can hear you speaking to the camera. No, you can't hear me from the camera. I'm just listening to you.
Okay, That's the AI bullet. I'll switch over the G5. Yeah.
Okay. Speak again. Testing. Hello? Hello. Hello.
Thank you, Daniel. Very well done. I don't know how well that came across on YouTube, but the background is much louder and the voices. are much clearer on the bullet than it is on the G5 bullets. So if you are looking for sound detection, I think the AI bullet most definitely is the winner of that competition. That's just straight out of the camera.
I haven't gone in the settings and tried to adjust it, just like the visual settings. I'm going with just raw out of the camera. So you may be able to go in and turn on some features inside of the cameras. There is some noise canceling features, etc.
to kind of tune in what you're trying to do there. But I did not have noise reduction on the microphone. This is default. And I had the microphone sensitivity 100 just as they come in default and I'll show you what I had the AI bullet as well.
Sensitivity was at 100. So but that was an apples to apples comparison. You know, the sound reduction there. I think the noise reduction would probably have made that more faint and worse on the bullet than better. I will tell you that a lot more ambient noise coming out of the AI bullet as well. So your mileage may vary there, but I definitely think that was a clear victory for the AI bullet.
I want to go over one last thing to you In those sound notifications. I this was a question that somebody asked me on Reddit or Facebook. And also this is another reminder to put any questions you have down to the comments, because they do lead to some interesting things that I did not think about, but somebody mentioned notification. So I'm going to go into notifications here and I'm going to go to push and I'm going to go to detections. This is a pretty interesting feature here because now I've got these different audio detections that I can put notifications on.
So if I hear a smoke alarm, I can text me a car alarm, can detect me blast breakage. Pretty cool stuff. You know, there's some stuff in here that is maybe in early access, so I'm not going to go into every little detail of it. But there's something on this page that may be for the eagle eyed amongst you is amazing feature. And I think it's going to be a really game, a big game changer and I've got a full video coming out on that notification feature but you can see that there's a lot of audio detections here and you are all going to get those features in the AI cameras, which is another reason that AI cameras probably are the better investment going forward that all being set, let's sum all this up, obviously the 800lbs gorilla in the room is the price of these two cameras. And you'll notice also the “AI BULLET” ranked pretty low on my all cameras comparison video.
And the reason is at 399, it is an expensive camera at 129. You know, I have no problem referring anybody to this G5 bullet. I think it's an incredible camera for that price.
I think the image is wonderful. It's got a lot of features that I think work and they just are, you know, for the 199, you're going to put it on the side of the building and forget it's there and it's just going to work for you. For 399.
The shortcomings of the AI bullet, although it is an amazing camera, you know, has a great image, did a pretty nice job on the audio test. It's got detections The big fall down for me and my location is that the license plate detections are a little, you know, ambitious for this camera that doesn't do a very good job them my parking lot is relatively big but I don't it's not giant by any stretch of the imagination. For most people, it's probably typical and it doesn't do a very good job of license plate detections in this parking lot. Now, it does do other detections pretty doggone well, You know. Color of the cars.
Yeah. The type of vehicle it does all of that really well. So if those other detections are important for you, then maybe it's worth the splurge. The other thing about it that probably makes it worth the splurge is that detections are only going to get better. Yeah, the detections that are that they have today are the worst they're ever going to be. They're only going to get better and more specific, especially if you have a bunch of cameras.
It's really easy to sort through a ton of data with the detections. So that was a lot of talk were would I use this camera? Where is it going to be effective for me, where I would use the AI bullet is where I had a really close area for detection. So I didn't need the throw or the zoom features of the AI pro maybe at a front door, maybe a like on the side of my building when I was doing license plate detection for the parking lot or the driveway, you know, that kind of location where I don't need to splurge all the way up to the AI Pro, but I definitely want the detections. What I probably do in that scenario, if you take my building, for example, I would find this on the side of the building where the driveway is close and it would work. But other locations like the back door, the back of the building, I don't need all those detections. And I would go with $129 out of the G5.
Bullet, I think is a great camera for those other locations. If it was me, I would put in AI pro or an AI bullet in areas where I needed the detections and I would put the G5 bullets where I didn't need those detections. I think it's a very cost effective camera. The G5 bullet. So if I was setting up a five camera system, let's say a six camera system, I might do one or two AI cameras, maybe an AI pro and a AI bullet based on where they were.
And then I would add the G5 bullets where I just need to see an image. I think the G5 bullets are wonderful camera for the price, but I am a little concerned that over time is going to show its age and it will not be getting the new features as they roll out. So. So that's my conclusion.
If you have any questions or you want us to test anything else on these cameras, please leave them in the comments down below. Otherwise, please like subscribe. We do these videos weekly and we'll see you guys in the next video.
2024-04-19 03:45
