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Hello, I am looking for a medium/good brand of DVRs to sell. I am not looking for the greatest/most expensive manufacturers, at least not to have in stock (if a customer wants it, I will find it). I will be going to Shen Zhen next week, and I am mainly interested on manufacturers in China. We have purchased/sold many brands of DVRs, and I would like to find a good name to work with that will have a good supply of their products. I would also like a company that at least can have menus on their DVRs in english, and not engrish. I am looking for different kind of DVRs, from low end 4ch CIF 100fps, to hopefully 16ch D1 400fps. Always SATA hard drivers, hopefully VGA outputs, IP connection, etc. Software/network support should be at least GOOD. A DVR on which you have to manually install a OCX file on windows to be able to connect from Explorer is no good. A DVR which does not work ok with IE8 is no good. All in all, I have been looking for manufacturers, and one that seems to be at least "good" to me is Hikvision. Their web site is down right now, which doesn't say anything good about them hehe, but from what I checked out it looked good. I do think they are based in Hangzhou (near Shanghai), but I shouldn't have any problems finding their products in Shen Zhen. http://www.hikvision.com/en/eindex.asp Anyone can give me information about Hikvision? Also, any other manufacturers/brands that could be worth checking out in Shen Zhen? Any inputs will be more than welcome, thanks!

This is not Q-See's fault. I won't say it is your fault either, but you can not blame in on the manufacturer. If you had x days to return the product to the store you purchased it from, if you were told by a salesman that this card will do this and that, but it doesn't, if you were promised some software that dopes not come with the card, and now you don't have it; this is not Q-See's problem, and they are not the ones to be held acountable because some other retailer closed doors.

I deal with one of their distributors, I always go now to Guangdong province in the south (Hong Kong, Shen Zhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan). Hikvision and Dahua main headquarters are in Hangzhou, on east China, near Shanghai and Ningbo. And anyway, I am small fish on a big sea, if I were to try to buy direct from them, they would probably just point at me and laugh

Thanks on your input tesc_cctvpro, I have been working with Hikvision and Dahua, and I am quite pleased with their products, hardware and softwarewise. I had been working with Hikvision products even before knowing it, since in Spain they were being rebranded with another name, those on my post from 24/Mar/2010 are Hikvision DVRs. I buy Hikvision and Dahua both from Spain and China, low-end models are usually cheaper for me to buy them in Spain from big importers, mid and high-end models usually are worth it for me to import them. And I will be going back to China in two weeks (I have been going to China 2 times a year since 2002). I know they are both the only 2 chinese companies amongst the top 50 cctv manufacturers in the world (from your post I understand there are now 3 chinese manufacturer on that list), and for now I am quite happy with their products. As you stated, "engrish" is a clear sign of low quality, crap documentation, and bad support.

You won't find another "compatible" viewing software. You are tied to using it to the included software/activew that comes with the DVR, if it is "really bad", only thing you can do is change to another DVR.

No clue, but being a 4 chip BT878 card, if you need drivers/software you can probably use it under Windows XP with BTWinCap opensource drivers. I would also say it is a 16ch 100fps card, but unless you have the cable for the big connector, you will probably only have the 4ch that have BNC connectors on the card. RCA connector is probably video out.

I know it is an old model, but I still work with Hikvision series 7000/7200 very often. There's better models today when watching from internet, but this one at least does D1 at 12fps, when most of the cheaper Hikvision models just do D1 at 6fps. Thanks!

My Hero is rooted and I have no problem installing APKs myself, will check it out, thanks! Any hints on where to sign up to know when they release the final version? Does Hikvision have any kind of mailing list, forum, or something to stay updated on their hardware/software releases?

Good to know, I just wanted to know for sure if it would work fine on IOS4, if it is just a minor glitch, no problem then... thanks!

Yaaaaaaay please send it over, my HTC Hero will be sooo happy!!

I did not even get to try and DVR. The problem I encountered with IVMS-4500 and IOS4 was that it would just sit there on the program login screen when the program boot up the first time, asking for user/password/reenter password. On IOS3, taping the "user" field brought up the phone keyboard, on IOS4 it just did nothing at all. I could also blame it on the customers iPhone. But, since I checked Apple Store and saw that IVMS-4500 is basedc on IOS3, I thought that maybe there was some kind of incompatibility... ?

Ok, here is one that will probably seem a very dumb question to be asking. I have read many times about "day/night" cameras, "true day/night" cameras which I do not even know if it would be the same, so the question is as simple as "what is a day/night camera"? (or "true day/night", whatever). I understand that it would be a camera with night vision (with infrarreds?) that has a mechanical IR filter, so it will filter out the IR during the day. This way, it will show good colors during the day, since it will not receive any IR, and then it will also have night vision. Is that about correct?

Thanks everyone on your inputs, very appreciated

No no, not at all... I am just trying to be able to understand in the future what exactly is or makes a camera be called "day night" or "true day night" Great, so it would be something like: * Digital D/N camera - no IR cut filter, but when low light, switches to B&W * True D/N camera - IR cut filter (also known as ICF, removable IR cut filter, whatever) * IR camera - it can be either Digital D/N or True D/N, but with IRs * D/N camera - all of the above Am I correct? So: * No color cameras can be D/N (neither True or Digital) * All IR cameras can be called D/N then, even junk IR cameras? * There are B&W cameras with very low lux that can not be called D/N, even if they have like 0.005lux This two last points are the ones that bother me. I always associated D/N cameras to "hey, this can't be crappy"... -+-+-+ Ok, so checking some catalogs now, I am starting to think that cameras with IR are just never called D/N at all. So D/N cameras I think must be just the ones that switch between color and B&W at night, either with (then they are True D/N) or without ICF (then they are called Digital D/N. I think this questions might look way too silly from someone in this business... I would just like to know better what I sell, and don't look stupid if I dare call something D/N, and it ends up not being D/N. Thanks

So, any camera that has removable IR cut filter can be called TDN? That is, that TDN would be just another way of saying a camera has that? If so then I will have to find out how to find that out... today I looked closely at several box cameras to compare, trying to look for a "mechanical" IR filter. I did see some cameras that apparently had filters in front of the sensors, but I am not sure I saw any that had a removable one... (Also read around about IR cut filter being called ICF, so ICF and TDN would be the same?)

Thanks on your inputs, but I am still not sure I have a clear "definition" on that "day/night" thing (TDN from now on as rory stated). So a TDN camera is just a camera that has good vision at night? Because, is there any way to measure how good TDN a camera is? Ok, so there are cameras with no IR that are called TDN, what I think would be my question is, how would a TDN camera be defined? What specs must it meet, if there is actually some specs to be called TDN? Or is TDN just merchandising, which manufacturers apply to their cameras as they see fit? Like, it CAN have removable IR cut filter, or it MUST have one so it can be called TDN? All this questions are because we have never called any of the cameras we sell "day/night" with those words, because we wouldn't even be able to say "why" we would be calling it TDN...

BEST and ECONOMICAL? Something does not quite add up here...

iVMS-4500 has worked flawlessly for me over here.

Old thread, but thanks a lot on this info!

What phone? If you have iphone, just search for ivms-4500 on the app store, it is free. If it is another phone, you need to be mopre specific. And yes, you will have 2 entries, but I think you have already solved that by now

This didn't happen to me with this DVR; but I have seen DVRs that with no gateway setup, you could connect to them correctly, login, but then you would get no video at all. Live view? Nope. Recorded videos? Nope. Seting up the gateway solved it, so I would never leave out that basic piece of info...

That won't do it... you need 2 ports forwarded. One for web access, one for data. I always change web port usually to 90, and leave data port at 8000. The forward 90 and 8000 from router to DVR (192.168.1.102). With only 8000 forwarded you would be able to use Hikvision CMS software, mobile phone clients, etc, but you would not have web interface for the DVR. You also MUST configure the DVR gateway so it can connect to the internet, I guess it will be in your case something like 192.168.1.1. Edit: No, I think you won't get this to work with Android for now... I would love to see Hikvision start releasing client programs for Android

That is I would say about NOT right in 95-99% of the cases. DVRs (PCI or UBS) that can be used with softwares different than the bundled one are not the rule, but the exception. With Easycap you have good chances to get it to work. You might need to use different drivers than the ones included. It might NOT work, since there are different manufacturers that sell their own version of "Easycap" with that same name, and there will be differences in hardware between them. From my experience, I can tell you that I use often one of this Easycaps for tests. I have it working under Win7 with no problem, but NOT with the included drivers (which work only under WinXP), but with some other drivers Google "gave" me. I can also tell you that it works great with AMCAP, and I am pretty sure that if I wanted to I would be able to configure it for let's say use it as a webcam with Messenger or Skype. I think there is a good chance you would be able to get it to work with that Mobiscope thing. I also thing that if you have no prior experience, you won't have it easy... If you wanted to go with a PCI card, you would have ir quite well with BT878 chip cards under Windows XP (I still have not tried them under Win7). Yes there is. Click on your desired phone, and then you will get links for the client for your mobile, and desktop version for your Windows/Mac OS computer

Huh... what feature? He was speaking about a DVR, so I am not sure how you can compare an IP camera to a 4ch DVR...

Why not just use a normal 12V 4A power supply, with a cable like this...?