My Prius basic version 2017 rear camera had pretty nice and detailed image quality during the day and night. Now my lease was finished and I got the new Prius Prime 2020 with regular upgrade (large screen). The first thing I noticed is that the rear camera quality was really bad at night time. It was blurry, and hard to see stuff especially when a car behind had front lights on. I did try to clean it with no success. The quality looks like a cheap 1MP analog camera. Anyone else encountered an issue like that? This is a huge downside for me.
I noticed right away that the backup camera in the Prime is more "muddy" than the one in the Prius Plugin. I suspect because they're using a color camera vs. black and white, which for the same sensor size offers only 1/4 the resolution.
Prime is the plugin. You mean Prius vs Prius Prime (plugin)? Yes, that's exactly what I meant. The Prius Prime 2020 is more muddy than the regular hybrid 2017 Prius. I'm going to see if I can mod the camera with better quality when I have free time..
I made the same switch and saw the same difference. Pretty disappointing. Your reasoning makes sense with the change to color. The lines are nice, though, even if they aren't predictive.
Interesting!! The 2018 brochure brags about the lines and doesn't say anything about some trims not having them. I can't find anything in my OM about disabling or enabling them. That is really strange! From the 2018 brochure:
The red horizontal line is there. I don't know what it's useful function is since it's 5 or 6 feet out. Now I'm going to have to check for the side lines. Maybe I just never noticed them.
On my 2017 Prime, the red line is approximately straight down from the rear of the vehicle and is a boundary you probably don't want to cross. It's useful if you're backing up to an object like the wall of your garage or a parking-lot wheel stop, because it lets you know where the back end of your car is. The "fish eye" nature of the camera just makes it look like the line is farther away. By the way, I put a strip of bright red duct tape on the center line of my garage floor. It makes it easy to alight the center mark in the camera when backing into the garage.
You made me go out and measure On mine it's 25 inches from the rear bumper to the point on the ground where the red line appears in the camera image.
I haven't measured the red line on mine. I have a strip of white duct tape down the center of my garage that I follow as I back in. I then have a short piece of crosswise white duct tape at my stop point. When it just barely disappears under the back bumper, that's where I stop, which leaves about 8 inches clearance between the front of the car and the garage door. As for the cyan lines, they are easy to see on mine. Perhaps adjusting the brightness and/or contrast will help you see them better. Now that I think of it, even though mine was used, I had to fiddle with that when I got it.
