buellwinkle

That is an unwritten word since he was banned. Living in the South Pacific, just get a cheap Dahua NVR. They make some cost effective models now in the same price range as the one you mention. Just go to dahuasecurity.com, pick out which one fits your needs and go for it. Shipping from the U.S. is very expensive, especially an NVR which is a large box.

I just took a 4mm ds-2cd2032-i, stuck a 25mm lens on, focused it on my boat, and i'm getting half the field of view that had with an 12mm camera there and everything is twice as big. Because it's such a long telephoto lens, the depth of field is not great, so I can get all the boats on my dock crystal clear which is what I want, but the boats in the distance are not as in-focus. I figure there's about a 100' depth of field.

You can get a battery operated camera like the Brinno MAC200, last a year on 2 batteries, strap it to a tree or pole and it records using it's PIR motion detection and see who's doing it. Also, there's many trail cameras that can serve the same purpose.

You can save some money and get the SD42212SN-HN Mini PTZ which is 12x for $499 at the place you mentioned earlier, runs on PoE+ (injector is $15), is much smaller and less obvious and having the IR on the lake would be a waste, trust me, we have a place that's lakefront and I keep an eye on my boat about 200-300' away now with a mini-bullet with a 25mm lens and it gives me pretty good detail, even if I could zoom in more, the field of view would be too narrow and I would miss the water skiers. Get up to 61mm (12X), and boats 400' away traveling at say 30mph will pass by your field of view pretty quick. Also, what happens with 30x zoom over water is the mist, haze distorts the image, so not sure you'll actually get more detail at 30x than at 12x. Yes, objects will be twice the size, but not as sharp.

Playing back HD video is tough on a CPU. What I do with Milestone is there's an option to use the second stream. What it does is makes the live view your second stream which you can make D1 resolution but recordings, playback are at full resolution. You'll see the CPU drop down to 1/4th. Generally, live viewing several cameras is not going to make much of a difference in video quality, after all, four 3MP cameras is 12MP and you monitor is likely only 2MP. Also, make sure you are using camera side motion detection as server side motion is the default on Milestone. I wrote a post about how to do this recently.

You just need to get the face to be at least 85 pixels tall and you can do that with any resolution and people have been doing that for years with analog cameras. Having an overview camera to see the crime in progress is great, but you'll need close up cameras at choke points, or areas where the suspect has to traverse that are as narrow as possible and a camera either close enough or with a long enough lens to capture their face. I'm experimenting with 25mm lens in a Hikvision bullet and I bet I can ID someone 70'+ away, albeit with a 13 degree viewing angle.

I believe someone tried the 2.8mm on the bullet and it didn't work out well, part of the image was cropped. I would imagine the wider angle the lens, the more barrel distortion, especially close up, and less likely for facial recognition. But availability, sure, you can just about any lens size for that camera, but it's trial and error. The ds-2cd3332-i eyeball comes in 2.8mm.

Actually does pretty well at night with the built in IR LEDs at 45' reflecting off the plate. Exposure time is 1/200th/sec, gain set to 75, VGA resolution. I think any LPR software should be OK with this as the characters are 17 pixels tall. You can probably go as far as 50', beyond that, characters get less than 15 pixels tall, you may not get recognition. If anyone wants the lens, PM me. For software, if there's any C developers out there that want to volunteer their time, I don't think it will be that hard to get this written using openalpr software as a standalone program.

Should not have a hard drive.

Here you go, 25mm in a ds-2cd2032, plate at 40-45' at VGA resolution. There's some CA, maybe slightly more than the factory lens, but should not affect LPR use at all. Lens fits barely, needs longer screws to hold the lens bracket to front lens assembly. Will research that. This is with the 12mm lens

Import duties for importing cameras from China to the U.S. is 1.9%. Consider yourself lucky if you got away with it. Small orders tend to bypass this, but the larger the order, the larger the risk. Friend of mine was a federal customs agent, used to follow larger cargo to see who picks up the package without paying duties and arrest them, but this was large cargo, not a few cameras.

Just turn the day of week display off and display the date only, problem solved. Why is it so important to display the day of week. Most other brands of cameras don't even have that as an option. Next time buy the cameras in the U.S. TFTP won't help, installing English firmware will not make the day of week English if it's a Chinese language camera.

Lite in price, not necessarily performance.

It's part of their Lite series which has better pricing like the 1080P bullet I reviewed that's like $40 less than their previous 1080P bullet. What looks like it may be cool is the NVR104 or 108 that's tiny, 7.5" x 5" x 1.4".

The reason would be if you had alarm input trigger (like a PIR motion detector) or some sort of built in motion detection like Hikvision's face or line traversal motion detection. Also, if I can save a few percent of CPU, why not, the CPU runs cooler, less power consumption, more CPU left over for other stuff.

You would have to buy a PoE switch that has at least 4 PoE ports and connect that to your network, same one as the NVR. Then you add the cameras manually with the IP you set for the camera. You can find and set the camera IP using the included SADP program.

It's the same for all supported cameras I use including Axis, ACTi, Mobotix & Hikvision.

Get Zoneminder, should run on a Raspberry PI. It's open source, free.

I'm using the Samsung 2.5" 95mm 2TB drive, nice and quiet, no issue with recordings or playback.

If that's your budget, I would use the old coax to pull Ethernet cable and go IP. A good varifocal bullet or dome are the Hikvision ds-2cd2632-i or ds-2cd2732-is and runs $259 each, so four would be slightly over a grand. Then you can use a PC with their free PCNVR software or get their NVR, about the same price. I like PC's because you have more flexibility and one that works for me is the Intel NUC i5, about $500ish with a 2TB drive and is 4.6 x 4.4 x 2", so very low power, low heat, fits in the palm of your hand. Then get an 8 port PoE switch, about $50-80. Their 8 channel NVR runs about $369 shipped, add a 2TB drive for about $100 If you want to save money, get the Hikvision ds-2cd2032-i mini bullets, $168 shipped and comes in various lens sizes. This would represent about 10x the resolution from analog which is about 0.3MP and the Hikvision are 3MP or you can go down t 1080P (2MP).

Find a different seller because Dahua does not have language specific versions and could be they didn't want to sell to you or they got confused with another brand like Hikvision that does have Chinese only versions.

The problem with analog is even if you get say 700TVL cameras, the recorder probably still records 480. It's just old technology and tough to accept when even inexpensive cell phones shoot 1080P video. If you want something cheap that will work, go to a Costco store, they have the Lorex HDCVI (if I spelled that right), eight 720P cameras with DVR for $500, includes HDD, uses the old coax wiring. 720P is double the resolution of 960H or about 3x the resolution of typical 480P analog. You can also go 1080P SDI, but will cost double.

As a photographer I use telephoto lenses when I purposely want a shallow DOF, the reason people use like 85mm lenses for portraits, to get what they call the bokeh, which is a pretty blurred background behind the subject. So it is what it is and I'm using 50mm on an Axis camera for LPR, but there's a certain point where the car passes the camera that I'm trying to capture, so it's focused for that and it works out well. At 25mm you should get a very clean plate at 30-40, I figure maybe a 10'-12' wide path. I have a 25mm lens ordered from where else, China, that may fit. It's slightly longer than the factory lens at 20mm long (factory is 18mm) and the head is 14mm, slightly wider than the factory lens, but still should fit in the foam hoodie on the glass and the hole in the IR ring is 15-16mm. Back-focus is about 8mm. it's made for a larger sensor and MP. I measured it out and the lens can stick about 4-5mm past the current lens and still fit and not hit the glass. Even them, maybe with a few washers, I can move the cast metal bracket away from the glass to make more room and there's space between the front and back half of the cameras so I can probably pickup 1-2mm if needed. I don't want to tell people where I got it because until it's proven, don't want to see people waste their money because nobody knows more than you that M12 lenses are a crap shoot.

Anytime you see WiFi on inexpensive cameras you know you are in for a challenge. This is one of those brands that likely nobody has heard of, hence nobody chimed in. The problem with WiFi for outdoor use is getting good enough reception without interference so that that you can get the bandwidth to support a 1MP camera. But for this science experiment, get the cameras in the same room as your WiFi router. First see if the cameras support encryption, WEP, WPA, WPA2, whatever you are using on your router and some WiFi products might not support current encryption methods like WPA2. So you could be banging your head against the wall if say the router is on WPA2 and your camera only supports WPA. Once you get everything to the lowest common denominator, the camera should have an option to search for SSIDs and you should be able to find yours, select it, enter the password and save it. Then you should be able to unplug the camera from the wall and Ethernet and plug it back in and it should recognize the WiFi. It's best to use a fixed IP address in your network for each camera so the NVR can find it after a reboot, so don't use DHCP if that's even an option on this camera. If reception is an issue, you may have to install repeaters. Post back if that's the case and I can share some repeater tech. Understand that in most cases, using WiFi is likely more expensive than using PoE wired cameras, because finding outlets or running high voltage along eaves and sides of houses is not as easy as running just low voltage Power over Ethernet and proper repeaters also add to the cost of WiFi.

Some of you have asked me how to setup camera side motion detection on Milestone XProtect as by default when you first add the camera, Milestone uses it's own motion detection, done inside the software. The downside is it uses more CPU, the upside is that it's easier to setup as you do nothing, it's automatic but you can tweak it. The instructions below show the 2013 version, but it's the same for the 2014 version. This is a brief guide on how to setup camera side motion detection on Milestone XProtect. This is all done in the Milestone XProtect Management Application. 1. Under Advanced Configuration on the left, then Events & Output, right click on Hardware Input Event and select Add New Input Event. Select the camera you want to do this for and check Motion Started on Camera 1 Window 1 and give this event a more unique name, like Driveway Motion Start and click OK. Then do the same for Motion Stopped on Camera 1 Window 1, you'll need both. You can also pick other stuff like Face Detection, Audio, whatever your camera supports 2. Then go to Cameras, select the camera, click the OPEN button and click on Motion Detect and uncheck Enable. It will give you some warning. 3. Now select Recording Properties on the left, uncheck built-in motion detection and check Event, select the Start event you created, select the Stop event you created and click OK. While here you can enable pre and post recording, I usually make it 3 and 8 seconds respectively As you go, you'll see it asking you to Save or Discard in a yellow banner on top, so click Save at anytime to save your work. If you try an exit without saving, it will prompt you again. To make sure it's recording, start Smart Client and see if it says "Recording" when motion happens.