buellwinkle

Not in the same league as Mobotix. If you plan on using more than 4, don't get this NVR, it only works with 4 cameras period. Then get the the cameras from Costco for $299 a pair, not too bad a deal. For the price of one Mobotix, you would have 8 cameras and an NVR. For what it's worth, the NVR's don't come with a hard drive but they are dirt cheap now. I got a 1.5TB locally at Microcenter for $65. I ordered a pair and will do a quick review, not sure if I will encounter anything different than the IPC-HFW2100N, I doubt it and I will ordered a couple of lenses from DX to test with the camera.

Avtech cameras like the ones I reviewed on my blog are great in this regard. They will alert you via a smartphone app immediately of a motion alert using it's PIR motion sensor and play back the last 10 or so seconds of video recorded for that event. You can also view the camera live at anytime with 2 way audio. If you get one with an SD card slot, you can view recorded video. Microphone and speaker and light built into most but not all models. Their smartphone apps are called Eagleeyes, they are free and available for IOS, Blackberry and Android. i tested and actively use them on my Droid Razr, iPhone, iPad, and Google Nexus 7 pad (yes, I have to many gadgets). They only downside is they are tough to find in the U.S. and wish they had a better presence here. As far as the cameras, excellent 1.3MP quality, maybe the best low light for a 1.3MP camera I've tested. Had them for a while in duty, never a hang or bug that go in the way of using 3 of them.

Ooh, that's bad LED light bleed. You can see the halo of the IR light ring. Can you return the camera? This is a problem with poorly designed domes. You can get away with poorly design bullets as the glass is flat, but not domes. Also, having an unpopular brand makes it hard to find software for recording.

That's the 1080P mini dome which is day only, hence the IR filter permanently coated on the filter. This has a mechanical IR filter behind the lens.

I had a good experience with the DX 2.1mm lens on a Foscam. The 2.1mm allowed me to cover an entire small room. Ideal for say a front door cam. Not that Foscam lenses are worth mentioning, going to the DX lens I got richer colors, sharper image edge to edge than the factory lens.

Does Luxriot work with Q-See/Dahua IP cameras?

I've changed lenses on Foscam cameras, pretty easy, you just unscrew the lens and screw in another and turn in/out to focus. I got my lens from DealExtreme (DX). They carry a bunch of sizes from 1.8mm on up. I used 2.1mm which gave me really nice indoor coverage for a room. It's been 2 years, but on my blog I mention this when I reviewed the FI8908. I have links to some of the lenses available on the post near this one about Dahua cameras at Costco.

I would imagine the IR cut filter is on that circuit board that holds the lens. What I would do is start by unclipping the ribbon cables and re-seating them to see if it's a poorly seated connector causing the problem. Try activating night and day mode from the menus to test it while it's apart to hear it click and you can also try a can of air to see if the blast gets it going. Short of that, you may contact the peeps you bought it from for a return or maybe they can send you a new board. If they won't help you, you may be able to contact one of the resellers in China and see if they'll sell you the part. Worst case, you can sell it on eBay for parts.

Did not know you are closer to China I do hope they fix the problem for you, but again, I believe most people are using this camera in 720P or 1.3MP mode. Also, if someone with a Q-See camera can complain, it may get additional attention. Be careful with doing a firmware upgrades, I bricked the IP-HFW2100 and I've done plenty of firmware upgrades across many brands of cameras and this is the first bricked camera.

The lens looks pretty standard and just unscrews. You remove the three allen head screws from the back of the camera, then remove 3 phillips head screws from the board, and you have full access to the lens. Just make sure you put it back with the same orientation. I used the sticker placement to remind me which way it goes back. Took all of about 5 minutes, 4 of it was spent looking for my allen wrench Of course, once you screw a new lens in, you'll need to focus it by screwing it in/out. DX is a good place to buy lenses. I've actually bought lenses here for a few dollars that were better than the factory lens on other cameras but that was on Foscam. Here's the 3.6mm for $2.10 shipped. http://dx.com/p/replacement-fixed-iris-lens-for-cctv-camera-3-6mm-45189?item=2 Here's a 2.8mm if you want to go wider, like a front door cam. They also have 2.1mm which I've bought from DX before and is excellent. http://dx.com/p/replacement-fixed-iris-wide-angle-lens-for-cctv-camera-2-8mm-51866?rt=1&p=2&m=2&r=3&k=1&t=1&s=47018&u=51866

Sure, but through Ingram Micro, you can get several Q-See cameras including the 1080P dome, the 1080P bullet, the 720P/1.3MP mini dome and mini bullet. You are correct, the mini bullet is 6mm, the mini domes are 3.6mm and the 1080P bullet is varifocal. I wonder how easy it is to change the lens. What's good is Q-See and Ingram Micro are in my backyard in the O.C. so I'll give them a call next week and see if I can convince them to open up their product line and change to the wider lens. The Dahua lenses are available in China, I would also have to check to see if you can get them.

I tried to replicate what you said, and it does crop a little, but not that much. Maybe from 720P to D1 you'll see more cropping as you are changing the aspect ratio, but from 1.3MP to D1 I saw maybe 10% cropping. Maybe it's me, but why would you buy a 1.3MP camera and run it at D1? As for Q-See, you have to first understand that Dahua is just a brand only available in China. If you buy Dahua in the U.S. like on eBay, it's a gray market camera that someone imported themselves from China through a Dahua reseller in China and sells them out of their garage. Dahua voids all warranties in such cases, I checked with them, so caveat emptor. Q-See is a legit company that has been selling Dahua cameras in the U.S. for many years, is available at major retailers in cluding Costco, Frys and others and sells through major distributors like Ingram Micro which is NYSE traded public company, Fortune 100. Sure, you can save a few bucks buying it in China, but is it worth getting an item that's not warrantied when for $150 you can just buy this camera at Costco or if you are an installer, just open an account with Ingram, their customer service is excellent. I've had an account them for 20 years. My concern is that you are expecting Dahua to care about you and fix software bugs where if you bought it gray market, there's no link between you and Dahua. So you have to complain to the guy you bought it from, who may pass the complaint to a reseller in China, who may pass the complaint to Dahua and maybe, just maybe, they'l fix it. OR you can buy it from a legit company with a support staff in the U.S. with direct ties to Dahua and maybe get somewhere, JUST SAYIN!

It can't work without DNS. DNS is the service that maps IP addresses to domain name. Without DNS, you would have to enter your SMTP's server's IP address, not their domain name. If you don't like google's, go on your PC, open a command window if it's windows, or a terminal window if it's a Mac. Enter ipconfig /all on Windows or ifconfig -a on a Mac and see what the DNS server that you PC is using and use the same one.

From what I've seen on my blog, people don't set the DNS properly. Try setting it to Google which is 8.8.8.8. Without DNS setup, it won't be able to find your email server.

I would be happy to test it and review it. I'm not saying ACTi NVR is better, but I can't imagine it being better because I haven't seen anything better. PM me where to download it and a trial key. I can test is with Dahua, Axis and ACTi at least.

I agree on that. I would never use Dahua on a project. First, the cost of the cameras is a fraction of the total job costs. For example, had someone bid OpenEye because it was cheap. The cameras performed poorly, sort of made Foscam look good. They had to rip them out, replaced with Mobotix D14s. Now Mobotix are not cheap, but overall the project was only 10% more but you can actually read license plates now and they actually stay up and not die when temps go up. But that's different than putting one in your driveway to catch someone breaking in your car and it's your labor, your time and $350 sounds way better than $1,500. I just think that the big names are coming out with some competitive pricing and the difference is getting smaller. Take the new Axis 5MP hemispherical dome for a list price of $599. Makes paying for $350 for 2MP not seem like such a bargain anymore.

Dahua NVR was sort of slow and trickier to find video. Entering data ranges and timelines were pretty crude. It's good for a home/small business that is not going to use it much. I did not try it, but some people say using the PSS software with their NVR makes it more usable. I've been using ACTi NVR software for a while and most recently 3.0. It's really good and not just because it's free. I have 6 cameras, and finding video is very easy. I usually set it for 8x speed, and click on the timeline of when I want to start playing it and it shows the events as they happen on all the cameras at once or you can look at one at a time. I can't imagine that Avigilon software would be better but I have not tried it. If you have all ACTi cameras, then absolutely use their NVR software. If you want a mix of cameras, then Avigilon software may be worth looking at, only if they had a free trial download. If you go Dahua, I've used BlueIris with it, works pretty well, not on par with ACTI NVR 3.0, but not bad but a little resource heavy. Also, briefly tried NVR+ from Linovision, worked well with the limited resources I had but pretty effecient. Both have trial versions, both are cheap.

Dahua has been around a while selling analog cameras. You can probably find someone in the analog camera part of this forum that has had Dahua cameras for way over 6 months.

I had it running on a atom processor based nettop, doesn't get much slower than that and it may have used 10-20% CPU with 6 cameras on it. So I think it will be fine. Just be careful of the ports so you don't have two web servers both listening on port 80.

This is the price you pay. People look for the free lunch, there's isn't any. It costs ACTi, Axis and most companies a bunch of money to provide offices and a staff in the U.S., provide support and customer service. Dahua has a different model, you buy the camera with none of the support, service or U.S. presense, in return, you get a lower price. Don't know if you can have it all, but I haven't seen it, a Dahua price with service of others. All said, I accept the risk because my attitude is cameras are disposable. It's like PC's, televisions, digital cameras, and cell phones. If I get 3 years out of camera, I'm moving on to the next new camera. There was a time during the intial growth of digital cameras where I would buy a new camera every 6 months because technology was changing that fast. Not so much now, so I have a quality camera that I expect to get several years out of. I don't think surveillence cameras have peaked, theres new stuff coming out every year. How can I be happy with a Dahua 1080P camera 3 years from now when they have a 10MP camera out?

Yes, you can use any day or night lens on either the right or left side with the exception of a special model called the D12-180 which takes a certain lens to make a 180 degree view.

BlueIris works well, costs $50, use their 14 day trial to see if you like it. Also, NVR+ from Linovision worked very well with Dahua, costs $20/cam.

By the inherent nature of IP cameras, there is a delay from the camera to apply postprocessing including noise reduction and compression. Some cameras have faster processors than others, but it's not instantaneos like an analog camera. Most software I've used has close to the same lag that accessing the camera directly via their web browser. You can speed things up by turning off compression (set it to the highest quality) and switch to a lower overhead compressoin algorythm, like mjpeg.

There's CCTV lens calculators on the net to figure out what lens you need to cover 50' and have enough pixel density to have facial recognition with many experts say the head has to be at least 80 pixels tallk to identify someone. So figure out what resolution you need to get at the angle of coverage you want and identify someone at 50'. Then you can talk price. Start with drawing out the area, preferably on a napkin you just used, then mark the camera location, mark the area you want to cover and draw lines back to the camera location, then get a protractor and figure out the coverage angle. That will pretty much tell you the lens you want. Then use those numbers in calculating pixel density at 50'. The specs for the cameras usually give you the viewing angle or if it's a varifocal lens, the range of angles covered by that lens.

Ditto on the firmware upgrade. I tried it on two cameras, one worked fine, one was bricked and sent back to China. The best software I tested with Dahua is NVR+. Get it from Linovision, runs about $20 per camera. Get the USB license stick version, then you can change cameras at will. Without it, you have to get a specific license key to each camera. Change it and you pay $20 for a new license key. It works well with Dahua, but not much else so I would only recomend this choice if you have 100% Dahua cameras. You can download the software and try it. It never expires except it shuts down every 2 hours to prevent you from getting too much use out of it unless you have a valid license key. They also have smartphone apps. Also, I've had good luck with BlueIris, $50, supports a wide range of cameras. At first I had issues with one camera getting jittery video recordings, but they came out with a software update and since then, on all Dahua cameras I've tested it with work great. They've improved their software from when I first used it. They have timeline views now so aid in finding recordings. No smartphone apps, but can be used with ANY browser, so you can view the cameras on your smartphone browser.