buellwinkle

I had hideaway license plates on my Audi, specifically for looks. In the O.C. cops don't hassle you for not having front plates and who wants front plates on their car? In L.A. and S.D. the cops are more particular. I'll throw a plate on the dash if I park there but it gets annoying. So I installed a hideaway license plate bracket. You push the keyfob remote and the plate dissapears. The problem is they are made cheap and fall apart in no time. Not car wash friendly. I could send it in for warranty repair but I figure it would just be a never ending cycle. If anyone has experience with one that is made well, I would love to put it back on.

At least for one model, I show day & night images and video, complete darkness night and street light dark in a typical suburban home scenario. The trick some vendors do is show night video in an urban environment which is much brighter.

In some cases, you can tone down the contrast to give you WDR like effect. Like my TCM-1231, says it does WDR but to me it just look like they decrease the contrast but the newer KCM-5611 actually maintains nice contrast while providing WDR. But don't think WDR is exclusive to surveillance cameras. It's the holy grail of digital photography too, expecially for wedding photography to capture the subtleness of shadows and lights playing against a bright white wedding gown while preserving detail in a black tux. You compensate to make the gown look good and destroy detail in the tux, you make the tux look good and the gown detail is blown out. Products are getting better every year, but nothing like the old days of film.

If you find out what it is, let us all know, I need 4 and do they come in motocycle plate sizes

That's not really WDR, that's BLC (baclight compensation) and the Dahua's have that.

I've used the second stream. For example, I can reference the second stream via RTSP to be used on some software. NVR's usually are more rigid as to what you can do. I should get a Dahua NVR soon and I'll see if there's some way to do it.

1. The pigtail at the end of these units seems quite big with all the connections. This is an issue as a typical vandal dome has conduit hole on the side for surface mounting. With Dahua, you'll have to get creative and put a round j-box to do this. 2. Do I really need WDR? WDR has advantages, being able to see better detail in shadows, depends on your situation. And no WDR for the Dahua cameras. 4. Does anyone know how the customs work in the US? I have bought plenty of stuff from China, Venezuela, Germany, Netherlands, Canada and other countries and never had any customs issues or paid any import duties or fees. Don't know the UK, isn't that near France, the country with the naked prince in Vegas?

You can buy photo blocker spray paint or plastic plate cover for your license plates to do this, but never knew if they worked or not.

Don't know how Geovison NVR works but I understand their reputation is their software is a CPU pig. ACTi NVR is free and uses the camera's motion detect or alarm input to trigger recording. At rest, with 6 cameras the PC is doing pretty much nothing. When it's recording, CPU may go up a few percent. If you haven't bought cameras yet, take a look at ACTi. I have some of my personal ACTi cameras for sale if you want to get started for a lower price. The downside of doing my camera reviews is I get a new camera, I like it, I replace an older camera with it, never ending cycle

You don't save hard disk space by having the camera do video motion detection vs. the server doing it. You only save CPU cycles. But video motion detection has it's weaknesses as shadows, bushes/trees blowing in the breeze can trigger it so to save on false motion detect events, many cameras have alarm inputs where you can attach a PIR motion detect which is more accurate and save HD space that way. Another way to save HD space is to have adequate lighting as noisy images don't compress as well. Frankly, I never worry about HD space, it's probably the cheapest thing on the system. 3TB SATA drives have dropped into the $150-200 range and 2TB drives are approaching $100.

Then it's jut broke. Is it under warranty?

Make stream 1 the low res, low frame rate stream and record off stream 2. I know with BlueIris, you can specify the stream in the camera command and record of stream 2. As John Lennon once said, "You may say I'm a streamer. But I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will be as one". But don't go by me, my wife says I always get the lyrics wrong.

Every camera is different but in general, if the camera has mic in, then it means you can use a regular microphone. If it says audio in, you have to get an amplified mic. There's CCTV stores or online shops that sell mics for this purpose. They are usually pretty small and you can make it discrete or buy cameras like Mobotix D14 or M12 that have mic and speaker built in. Audio out usually means you need an amplified speaker and in the case where I see this used it's box speaker mounted near the camera. All this attaches to the camera in various ways depending on the manufacturer, but typically it's a terminal block that you wire into where there's audio in/out and alarm i/o. As I've said for many, many years, RTFM.

Damm. Nobody PM'ed me trying to sell me on Dahua. They must like you.

Sensor is burned out. Next step is landfill. Did you use it where there was direct sunlight?

Check amazon and ebay, there's at least two importers of Dahua there. Not every importer imports the same models.

Don't use all megapixel cameras or use less if the resolution can cover what you needed 12 cameras to do in the past. For me, I would rather have half the cameras in HD resolution than twice as many analog D1 cameras.

That's great, wish more companies did that.

If you record to SD card, you'll need to have their PSS software to view the recordings. Not sure how that works, did not try it. You can have the Dahua FTP recordings and you can buy a NAS drive for pretty cheap these days, like $129 for 1TB up to $229 for 3TB from WD and Buffalo. The problem is how do you view the recordings, not easy. You have a bunch of directories and files to open one up at a time to view. NVR software provides more than that with timelines and/or thumbnail views to aid in finding what you recorded. Also consider a Dahua NVR. Probably won't use up much more electricity than a Tivo or other PVR. And they are cost effective. I'm going to be doing a review on one pretty soon, just waiting for it to arrive.

That would be very useful. For example, alleys, side yards where it's long an narrow, to take a 1080P image and make it vertical would be great. It would likely have to be a dome camera with 3 axis adjustments that can physically rotate the image 90 degrees then software would have to rotate the image so that it's not sideways. Doesn't seem that hard to do. How would you display it? Say a 1080x1920 resolution image on a 1080P monitor? Would you have a monitor that tilted in portrait mode? Would you just display a shruken max of 610x1080? How would you mix portrait and lanscape mode images on the same display if say I had 50/50 mix of each? So to be clear, this is what the OP wants - Rotated as is to Where I thought he meant -

For under $200 your choices are limited. Dahua is probably your only choice. They have a bullet, the IPC-HFW2100, has illuminators, day/night, 1.3MP. They have a mini-dome coming out soon that's probably comperable to the bullet, just different shape called the IPC-HDW2100 for probably the same price. They don't seem to put varifocal lenses on their low end but you can order from a selection of lenses like 3, 6 & 8mm. If you buy in quantity, I'm sure you can work out lower prices. If you step up to a Taiwan company, the prices do go up, but so does the level of support and service and a U.S. presense. ACti makes a camera comperable to the IPC-HFW2100 called the TCM-1111 for just under $300. To get varifocal lens means stepping up to the TCM-1231, now the price doubles. Decent vandal domes with illuminators will be in the $500-800 range. I use an ACTi TCM-7811 dome in front of my house, but not cheap. The theory is you can use less HD cameras vs. D1 cams to cover an area that may justify the higher cost. Most people have cellphones in their pockets capable of recording 1080P video, most have TV's that can play 1080P video. I don't understand anyone that would want analog D1 equipment or buy an old analog tube TV.

You could visit my review of Exacq that walks you through the steps I went through, just sayin! This is the screen where you activate the license key.

When I setup my ACTi cameras, it used the motion detection settings I had setup on my cameras and started to work automagically. Did you turn on camera recordings? It's on this screen

When you say rotate the inputs 90 degrees, you mean you want to see the image sideways or somehow normalized so say a 16:9 aspect ration is now 9:16?

When you consider what you are getting compared to other vendors, $300-400 for a 1080P camera, varifocal lens, good low light peformance, IR illuminators, it's a steal. A comperable camera from Taiwan (ACTi, Messoa, Vivotek, Geovision, Speco, Brickcom) would be double in price. The reason that little 1080P dome is cheap is that a) it's a day only camera, b) has limited settings for a dome. Adding day/night IR cut filter on most brands adds $100 by itself. Why not stick with 720P/1.3MP. When you think about it, the 1.3MP cameras Dahua have images that are 960 pixels tall vs. 1080 pixels tall, only about a 10% difference for something like facial recognition. I use 1.3MP on most of my house indoors and out because it's all you need for smaller areas in a home or small business. Sometimes I find 1080P and the 16:9 aspect ration too wide. I have yet to use a 1080P camera in a commercial environment, all 3MP, not for the better resolution, but for the 4:3 aspect ratio. I believe the 1.3MP bullets are on eBay for $185 shipped which is a pretty good deal and way smaller than the 1080P bullet. What price range did you feel makes it affordable for you (and be realistic)?