video quality from backup camera

Hello all,

I hope someone can help with this because I have no ideas.  The situation is this, I have a truck which has a factory backup camera that displays in the navigation head unit.  This image is very good...with good detail and good (bright) colors.  I often pull a trailer with this truck and have added a backup camera to the trailer.  This camera also displays in the navigation head unit.  The problem is that the image from the trailer camera is nowhere near as good as the trucks camera.  The primary problem is that the image looks nearly black & white...the colors are all washed out.  I have tried a couple of different cameras and so far all the ones I have tried have the same problem.  I am sure the problem is the camera becauase I have tried connecting the trucks factory camera in place of the trailers camera and it looks fine.

I realize I could just keep trying different cameras untill I find one that is good but that approach could get rather costly pretty quickly. 

So I am hoping someone here can help me understand what to look for when shopping for a camera...what makes one better than another.  What are the specs I should be looking at?

Oh one other point, the trailer camera has the IR LEDs due to the backup lights of the trailer being almost worthless as far as illumination for the camera view.  Just to be clear though, I am not saying that the image after dark (when using the IR LEDs) is bad...I expect that to be bad...the problem I am talking about is in full daylight.

Thanks,

Steve

Well, I have pretty much done that.  I have connected the trailer camera in place of the OEM tailgate camera.  As mentioned before the OEM camera shows a really nice image.  However when I connect the trailer camera there the image is crappy (again the best way I can describe it is that it is washed out).  Further when I connect the OEM camera in place of the trailer camera (using the same wiring that the trailer camera used) I get a perfectly fine image.  These swaps prove to me that the problem is the camera not the wiring.

I think my choice of camera for the trailer was just not a very good quality camera.  But again I have tried a couple different cameras (cheap ones and not so cheap ones) with the same results.  No camera I have tried (except the OEM camera) produces a good image that does not have the colors washed out.

I was hoping that someone here could either suggest a good quality camera or (preferably) explain the attributes of these cameras such that I can search for another one and have a good idea of the quality of image it will provide prior to spending any cash on it.

Thanks,  Steve

I actually have an OEM camera that I found on EBay but there is no good way to use it on the trailer.  The OEM camera mounts in the tailgate handle on the truck.  The trailer is an enclosed car hauler where the back door opens to be the ramp used to drive the car up into the trailer.  Really the only solution I have found to get a camera permanently mounted to this (I do not want a cheezy little license plate camera) is to bore a hole in the rear door and mount a bullet style camera in the hole.  The camera I currently am using is a Boyo VTK-350 which is not an expensive camera but as I say I have tried others that were more expensive with the same results.

Thanks, Steve