How to disable (turn off) LED illuminator lights on Dahua IP surveillance camera

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on August 25th 2023 - Listed in Hardware Security Network Surveillance

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I've recently bought new surveillance cameras from Dahua. I've been using IP cameras from Dahua since 2016 and they turned out to be excellent and resilient devices. There were no issues throughout all these years, through hot and cold weather, they've been running smoothly and all powered over ethernet (poe).

Back in 2016 I started with my first Dahua model, the IPC-HFW4300S (which was later rebranded as IPC-HFW1320S). I also wrote a blog post how to upgrade the firmware of a Dahua camera.

Note: The only annoying thing was (on the older cameras) the browser live stream would only work in an EOL Internet explorer. You could work-around this by directly accessing the real time stream (rtp).

New Dahua cameras (2023)

Now that I've recently moved, I prepared a new set of newer Dahua cameras with a manufacturing date in 2023. The new model I chose was the IPC-HFW2439SP.

The (static) network configuration still works the same way as on older Dahua cameras:

• Plug Dahua camera to power and network (or combine PoE network). You can either use a direct LAN connection using a cross-over cable or use a small (unmanaged) switch.
  
• Set static IP on your computer to something in 192.168.1.0/24 range (but not 192.168.1.108), use netmask 255.255.255.0 (if you haven't noticed from the CIDR address)
  
• Access Dahua camera on http://192.168.1.108
  
• Configuration in the browser

The immediate change I recognized was that the live stream is now working in a modern browser. Looks like Dahua (finally) switched to HTML5 for showing the video stream. Yay!

Lights from the camera?

Later in the evening, once the cameras installed and the sun set, I realized a steady light in front of the door. After I checked, I realized the light is coming from the camera.

I wasn't used to this - the older cameras certainly did not have this "feature". Actually it even shows this on the camera package - but I didn't realize it. However the steady light can be annoying; not just to me but probably also for my neighbors. So I was looking for an option in the settings to disable the light.

Under Camera -> Conditions there's the "Illuminator" setting. The default option, at least on the IPC-HFW2439SP model, is on (Mode Auto).

By setting the Mode to "Off", the light can be fully disabled and turned off.

The light is not needed for night vision by the way. This is achieved using the infrared sensor which works independently of the light.

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