Do the images from your Blink Mini look like this
Instead of this?
There are two reasons why your Blink Mini isn’t in colour.
- Night vision control is set to “on”
- The light sensor within the camera is broken
Night vision control is “on”
The most common reason for the video clips or photos in Mini cameras to be black and white and not in colour is because the night vision settings have been changed.
Your night vision has been set so that it is on constantly and I will explain why this is a little later.
For now, let’s fix the setting so that you start to see your images and videos in sharp 1080p colour.
It is a really simple fix which will only take a few seconds.
And this is how you do it.
The night vision settings are found within video and photo settings of the device settings menu.
Once the settings are open, tap on night vision and a screen with three options opens up.
Night vision controls
The three options are: (always) on, (always) off or auto.re are
Auto
Let’s start with the auto option because this will allow me to explain things a bit more.
The Blink Mini is fitted with an infrared sensor and a light sensor.
During the day and in bright conditions the Blink Mini uses its colour lens to record images and clips.
When the light sensor detects that it is getting dark, the colour lens is shut down and the infrared sensor is started up.
Any clips or images produced in low light or dark conditions will be black and white because they have been created with the infrared sensor.
Auto is the default setting for night vision within the Mini camera because it suits most people’s needs and it makes use of both the colour Len’s and the infrared sensor within the Blink Mini
Off
If “off” is selected, this refers to the infrared sensor. When it gets dark, the light sensor will stop the colour lens from working but since the infrared sensor won’t operate no motion clips or motion alerts will be sent.
If night vision is set to off you won’t get alerts or clips in low light or dark conditions.
On
If “on” is selected, the opposite is true. The colour lens will be stopped from working and all clips will be black and white (no matter what time of day) as they have been created with the infrared sensor.
And this is the setting that your Mini camera was on which is why you are only seeing black and white images and video clips!
But those aren’t the only control that you have over night vision with your Blink Mini.
There are a further three options which allow you to control the intensity that the infrared performs at. These intensity levels work when night vision is set to on or auto.
IR Intensity
This option allows you to change the sensitivity that the infrared sensor works at- low, medium or high.
Low
If the infrared sensor is set to low, the sensor is working at its weakest level. This means that it will only register objects that emit the strongest amounts of infrared such as large animals or humans or objects that are closer to the camera
High
Setting it to high means that the sensor is operating at its most powerful. It can detect smaller objects that are further away from the camera (relative to the low setting.)
The medium setting forces the infrared sensor to perform somewhere in between the low and high positions.
This article demonstrates how the image quality changes between the different intensities.
A much more unlikely reason that your Blink Mini is in black and white is because the light sensor is broken.
Broken light sensor
As I described above, the Blink Mini is equipped with a light sensor which controls when the camera uses its infrared sensor or its standard lens to produce the images. The light sensor is constantly monitoring light levels around the camera and when these light levels drop too much, the infrared sensor takes over.
As soon as the environment around the Mini becomes lighter, the 1080p lens is used instead.
Here is a little test I ran to check how dark a room needs to be in order for the infrared sensor to “kick in”.
It is during the day and My Blink Mini was is a room with a blind in it which I slowly pull down.
