The makers of
PhotoBlocker spray claim that their product will make your license plate invisible to photo radar, red light cameras, and infrared and laster cameras. Special crystals in the spray will reflect back the flash (or light source) used by these cameras, making your license look like a bright blur. Would this actually work? Would it be legal if it did? They say that the spray is invisible to the naked eye, which means that it won't be of much use if a cop pulls you over. Personally, I've always thought someone should make a stealth car, made out of the same material as the stealth airplanes. That would be cool. (via
Red Ferret)
Comments
i guess i'll keep searching for the truth
I don't give a flyin' fart fudge cycle what you think or believe about anything.
I said I would reveal what happens with my personal situation - and.. "if I do not receive a ticket in the mail I would personally recommend the product".
today 04/21/07 I received a ticket in the mail with all the qualifications for a valid citation. Therefore, I do not personally recommend purchasing this (Photo Blocker) product.
Sincerely, Richard
"Cranky,
I don't give a flyin' fart fudge cycle what you think or believe about anything."
You ARE a charmer, aren't you? So, how much did you pay for that Dale Carnegie course?
Hey, everyone, Richard got a ticket! Alert the media.
Jamie
I sprayed the plate about 8-10 layers, after each layer I waited for it dry and take a picture with my digital cam from different angles then applied another layer.
I keep doing that but every single picture shown the license plate clearly, so I kept applying the product. I used almost entire can of spray, it advertised that it supposedly enough for 4 plates but I used about 5/6 of the can and it still show the plate clearly on my digital camera from many different angles and distances from the plate so i gave up.
For the people that made it works, how did you do it ??
The product only give my plate a very shinny clear coat paint over the plate, it is quite thick too since i used almost the entire can but still does not work.
If you were fairly close (say 3 meters), off angle from perpendicular (say 10-20 degrees), you utilised the flash AND you can still make out the lettering, then I would say you bought a useless glossy lacquer.
Did you test it on a retro reflective plate (UK style) or a non-retro reflective plate?
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Speed Measurement Laboratories -- consultants to police departments and radar and radar-detector makers worldwide -- has tested most products designed to defeat photo enforcement, including car waxes and stealth sprays that claim to make cars "invisible to radar," photo-flash devices designed to flash back at cameras and the high-gloss tag sprays.
"There's a lot of good people in the industry who are honest and a lot of charlatans. But it doesn't work, that's the bottom line," says Carl Fors, owner of the Fort Worth company.
The bounce-back-the-flash concept does work sometimes, he says, but only on positive images traffic cameras produce. "If we reverse the image, go to a negative image, we can read every letter on a license plate," he says.
Fors says the firms that make and operate radar camera systems and analyze the photos for municipalities routinely check negatives where license plates look unreadable. "Going to the negative image is no big deal," he says.
PhotoBlocker's Scott concedes that adjusting the images can "sometimes" reveal the tag numbers, but "these companies will just throw out anything that's questionable. They don't want to have to dispute it in court and it's not cost-effective for them."
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That right there is the preventative. You mess up the image just enough so that it doesn't make fiscal sense for a company auto-processing tens of thousands of these images daily to pursue things further. Basically, you just slip through the cracks.
Far as I'm concerned, a miss is as good as a mile, and no ticket is the point, however one arrives at it.
"There's a lot of good people in the industry who are honest and a lot of charlatans. But it doesn't work, that's the bottom line," says Carl Fors, owner of the Fort Worth company.
C:\photoblocker\DSC01326.JPG
C:\photoblocker\DSC01329.JPG
Works very good at night
C:\photoblocker\DSC01208.JPG
C:\photoblocker\DSC01211.JPG
as you can see it works and this is with a digicam flash, the speed camera flash is a lot more powerful
some of the pic you can see some of my letter but you cant make it out
Mate, those are good photos but cameras use FILM and you used a DIGITAL camera. Film is much harder to saturate than a digital imager, the latter having a limited dynamic range for all pixels. Also, because of the saturated nature of your digital photos, the jpeg compression algorithms WILL remove some of the detail; again that does not apply to film. Film would also record at a higher effective resolution than what you
I see all the time people hook up a lap top in the red-light camera and download the images I don
In a typical system, cameras are positioned at the corners of an intersection, on poles a few yards high. The cameras point inward, so they can photograph cars driving through the intersection. Generally, a red-light system has cameras at all four corners of an intersection, to photograph cars going in different directions and get pictures from different angles. Some systems use film cameras, but most newer systems use digital cameras.
all of them in australia is digital they only started poping up 2-3 years ago
Besides, digital imagers can be made to do something special. Your average consumer digicam uses an 8-bit, slightly non-linear, fixed gain ADC (across each photo), as well as a cheap CCD imager, the pixel wells of which can
i didn
Film and specially setup digital cameras can capture a very wide range of light intensities, especially compared to cheaper consumer digital cameras storing photos using the poorer JPEG format. Also, many plates are retro-reflective anyway (just like what your spray is supposed to be to be able to blind the camera) so enforcement cameras have to be setup to be able to photo plates with a PROPER retro-reflective backing without the risk of blooming or saturation. Therefore, the whiteout you see in your photos, impressive at they may appear to be, is not a reflection of what it would look like in a real enforcement photo.
In fact, closely examine the area immediately below the plate in your photos. There is a very strong white haze where it should be totally dark (apart from the first photo); that haze alone registers more than halfway up the displayed intensity scale. This is indicative of a poor camera optics system; it could well be this artefact alone that resulted with the lettering of the plate being almost indistinguishable.
Your photos have proven one critical thing to me:
Whether or not your plate is retro-reflective, the spray you used, while seemingly retro-reflective, is not retro-reflective enough to render the lettering indistinguishable from the background. In fact, the background would likely have been many times brighter than the characters, but your setup will have masked this so casting the FALSE ILLUSION that they are washed out.
In English: even though your test is invalid, it still proves your spray to be a total failure. Sorry.
If I may repeat myself:
I can even dismiss the photo (from the video) of the result of the "independent testing" on Phantomplate.com - why? Basic examination of the image shows it has been severely subjected to compression artifacting (you can easily see the 8x8 blocks where the average intensity has been used, yet I clearly see some detail on the plate!?!?!). I note the Denver Police Department didn
im still selling the spray and covers and have been doing well,
now that summer is here i will be at a number of car shows and show and shins...
the covers work great and teh spray is working well,
i sell the photostoper spray and not teh photoblocker spray now,
teh only reson i changes is because teh Photostopper is made and shipped in Canada, i saved me thousands in S/H cost.
but i stil sell plenty.
I think you are photoblocker, and mad at on track that they sell better products.
Their Photostopper works great, and it does not yellow on your plate like the other one does. It is cheaper tooo.
Ontrack is business the longest, before any other guys even existed!!! Their sprays have been around for way longer than anybody. They know what they are doing. I have a cover and spray, and no tickets for a very long time.
What Dorf says is true. Look here:
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/press.aspx?id=3712
The attorney general has leaned on Photoblocker really heavy, for doing bad stuff, like deceiving people and lying about their products. They got a huge fine of $25,000 for doing this.
On Track is the way to go boys. 😊
If you had actually read and digested the posts in this thread, you would have realised that deliberately triggering a camera and not getting a ticket is not proof that the sprays really work. This was the point of my contribution to this thread - to highlight and logically explain the flaws in the given arguments, not simply to spout "yes it does, no it doesn't". I'm also looking for real results, but I like to know that the claimed 'reality' is genuine! If you wish to simply take posts at face value, then Steve
Dave from N.Y.
Course that all got to the point one in ten people know someone who has an uncle who has one mounted on an SHO that is constantly speeding without being ticketed 🙄
If these photoblocker sprays actually were retro-reflective (that
what's funny is that you don't have to pay the ticket, they won't put an arrest warrant on you like a real ticket, but you get bad credit cause they claim you owe them money. The actual company is based in Arizona, we have to pay the company in arizona, is that effed up or what? Personally I have never been caught by those cameras although on a couple of occasions i felt like "oh sh*t I'm sure I crossed that when it was red!", but no tickets as of yet :D
When using teh SPRAY your plate as instructed,
BUT NOW GET A CLEAR COVER, LIKE THE ONES FROM TEH DOLLER STORE AND SPRAY THE INSIDE OF THAT COVER A FEW TIMES LETTING IT DAY AND A FEW COTES ON TEH OUTSIDE AND LET IT DAY.
the reason for teh change is the cops are reversing the image with photoshop, so using the clear cover will give you a stronger flash back.
we were only notified by two people who sent us in a copy of the summons and you can tell the first picture of the whole car the spray worked, you cannot read the plate, but the close up of the plate was lightly able to read, but you can see the different shows now and tell what the cops did.
htp://www.photoblockercanada.com
they must be worried.
That said, Although it probably does work in ideal circumstances (if your plate is spotlessly clean and at the correct angle) Photoblocker spray is probably the least effective tool for defeating our unconstitutional speed cameras. But it is the most invisible. So if you're worried about anyone seeing your countermeasures it is your only option.
The most effective countermeasures are the clear lenses that distort the view of the plate when viewed at an angle. Despite the illegal nature of the lenses I've been driving around with them for just shy of four years and haven't had a problem with law enforcement.
In fact, the law enforcement personell that I've spoken to regard speed cameras the same as a clerk regards self-checkout registers. They're there to eliminate jobs. So as long as you're not driving like a nut it is doubtful you'll encounter a problem.
Any one who says this snake oil in a can works is lying through their teeth.
There is a big difference between driving on the edge through cities in a heavy vehicle, and normal travelling. It is expected that slowly accelerating vehicles, when negotiating their way through short straights (congested cities), will rarely manage high speeds; the higher speeds they do reach last for very short periods. Your comparison couldn
I have faxed one of the tickets to the makers per their request and have as of yet heard nothing.In my opinion, this is a scam product.
http://www.ketv.com/news/8068453/detail.html