buellwinkle

Yes, it communicates back to the mother ship. If you try to activate the same license on two PC's, it only allows one.

Wow, you must work for Hikvision so I'll take on the ACTi side. iVMS4200 from Hikvision is not in the same league as ACTi NVR 3.0 and it also supports non-ACTi cameras. Software is ACTi's strong point with lots of application they are providing for free including LPR. What was the Hikvision solution for LPR, oops, they don't have one. As for price, yes, you have to pay more for a product with a U.S. warranty, service and support and to some it's worth it, to some it's not. You start getting into the more serious Hikvision USA branded cameras from with their USA support and there's not that much of a difference in price at the wholesale level, for a full size vandal dome, maybe 25% more. It's like cars. Telling me you can get a Kia for $20K that can do everything a Honda can do that costs $25K may be a truth, ergo, cost & performance wise, Honda is not there.

Works fine on my ds-2cd2032-i mini bullet. It's likely a cache issue on your browser.

Yes, Cat5, Cat6, just use cheap crimp type RJ45 with a cheapo $10 crimper, works every time except when I make a mistake in the wire layout.

960H is the new marketing way of saying 480P, weird huh?

Could be anti-virus software, could be an IP address conflict, tough one as I can access my 2732 from home, from WAN, from Mac, from Windows 7 or 8.1 browsers without a problem. What firmware version are you running on the 2732?

I like bullets because they are easy to install, have flat glass so not as susceptible to glare and reflections like a curved surface. I like domes in some cases where the camera has to be mounted lower and reachable because they are typically vandal proof. Also, the in-between is the eyeball camera that Hikvision calls the turret. And there's specialty cameras like covert or PTZ cameras. Alternatively to Hikvision in that price range is Dahua, made in the same town, they represent the 2 largest surveillance camera manufacturers in the world. But being from China, support is not ideal but resellers and distributors in the U.S. have picked up much of that slack. There are several OEM's for both these like Lorex, Q-See, LTS, Swann. The next step up are the Taiwan companies, they've had a presence in the U.S. for sometime now and used to handling customer support, service & warranty like ACTi, Messoa, Geovision, Vivotek. Figure their cameras are double the Chinese cameras in price. The next step up from Taiwan are the European, Japanese, American companies, Axis, Mobotix, Avigilon, Bosch, Panasonic, Sony. Figure their cameras are double the Taiwan cameras in price.

The problem I heard is Hikvision cameras are not compatible with Lorex. For example, if you buy the Lorex NVR from Costco, you are stuck buying only Lorex cameras. So what does that mean to you? It means you can't chose the same camera with a different lens, for example you may want to use a narrow field of view lens for side yards, like 6mm or 12mm or you may want to use a cube camera indoors with mic & speaker, or a varifocal lens camera. A lower cost alternative using Hikvision may be to buy the cameras and chose them by location and then use a spare PC to run the free iVMS4200 PCNVR software to do the recording.

It looked good when they demo'ed it at ISC. Sort of pricey though, in the $400-600 range from what I've seen. There's no such thing an authorized Hikvision USA reseller as they don't allow resellers and they've been voiding warranties if not purchased directly from an authorized distributor on their website by an installer/integrator. Gave me a hard time but proved I bought them through ADI Global before they would talk to me. Weird to me but I can understand that supporting inexperienced end-users is not something they are setup for or want to do. If warranty & service is important to you, consider Axis or ACTi that have good customer support and embrace end users.

Try http://www.m12lenses.com/ as some people have had good luck there. The problem with M12 lenses an IR cameras is you'll have to find one that's the same length. Too long and it won't fit in the case, too short and you'll get IR light bleed from the LEDs. To ID someone with an analog camera at 100', my guess is you'll need about an 80mm lens. We use a 50mm lens at about 70' so I would think you need more than 50mm for sure. Also, you do realize that the IR won't go that far, so you'll have to have lights 100' away.

You have to chop off the old connector anyway since the barrel will only slip over the cable, not an RJ45 plug. Then put on a simple RJ45 plug without the stress relief or hoodie.

We use Milestone Express that provides redundancy on it's own.

Hikvision purchases cameras from other manufactures???? Got any proof? That's a new one, the largest manufacturer of surveillance cameras in the world would not need to buy cameras from someone else. They may buy chips, sensors, LEDs from other manufacturers, but not cameras. As for Hikision OEM's, tons of them, Swann, Lorex, Trendnet, LTS, Flir just to name a few. They will sign OEM agreements with anyone that buys the minimum order quantity to be an OEM.

Just because they do it, doesn't make right. The OP is talking an 11 drive RAID 5, that's just crazy and I bet would be on the order of 5-10x slower than JBOD. I bet if Avigilon is doing it, it's likely at worst a RAID 5 configuration with 4 drives, still slower than JBOD but probably acceptable for NVR use.

I would go 1080P IP PTZ, something with IR built in so you can see at night. The prices have come down on this and you can do well for under a grand.

Some cameras like Mobotix and Dahua by default have an auto-reboot so the concept is not new. I use managed switches so I can bounce power to one or more cameras remotely. The other downside is if the camera was in the middle of recording to an SD card, NAS, or FTP, you may corrupt something by just pulling power daily.

In my testing, SAS is faster in general, but the rates you'll likely be recording, SATA is fine. I'm not that familiar with Exacq, but what I do in Milestone is specify what drive a camera writes to, for example, if I had 20 cameras and 4 drives, I would have 5 camera write to one drive and make sure that related cameras that may trigger simultaneously write to different drives. Also, check out WD Purple SATA drives as they are designed for NVR use. Also, don't put too many drives on one controller as you'll saturated that quickly. I would not use RAID 5 because it really slows down writes. I've been doing this for over 30 years and have spent lots of time in design at EMC's offices working on what configuration works best for different scenario. First consider that this is basically write only most of the time. The disks will get badly fragmented and RAID has to manage that across the LUN and it's not going to be pretty for writes as the heads will be bouncing around for space fragments. You probably setup servers where you do a lot of concurrent many reads, few writes like databases, but this is the opposite.

I believe with the Hikvision you can set different profiles for day and night but have not tried it.

You can run the 16 cameras with an i3 PC that cost half that with Milestone. So maybe $1,200 for the PC and camera licenses. An 32ch NVR can cost that much with 1 hard drive. I run 10 cameras, full frame rate, 8 3MP, 2 1.3MP and I'm using under 20% of a first generation i3 and the new i3's are at least 50% faster. BTW, iVMS4200 PCNVR software is actually very efficient, no reason not to use that on an i3.

Typically you connect the camera to a PoE switch or injector that is connected to your network unless it's not PoE and in that case you plug the power supply into the camera and then attach the camera via an Ethernet cable to your router to connect it to your network. Sometimes it takes a minute or so for it to boot up. Then use the camera finder software that comes with the camera as that finds where it is on your network. Use that software to change the IP address to a valid address in your network with the proper subnet mask and gateway address. Then enter that IP address in a browser and log into the camera and you should see the live video and menus to allow you to change options on the cameras.

When they refer to 1080P, they are referring to the display for the DVR, not the cameras which are analog 960h (960 by 480 pixels).

Wow, 1TB per camera, now I feel inadequate as I have 5 per 1TB drive. Get a cheap 4 channel NVR, typically the same as the camera vendor. It will use way less electricity than a PC and will likely have the PoE switch built in. It will plug into the TV and he can watch it by switching to that HDMI on the TV. Get a wireless USB mouse and he can control it like a remote. You can also get a tablet for him, so when he goes to the can, he can watch the cameras using an IOS or Android app. Figure you can find a 4 channel NVR for $299ish, put 2 hard drives in it, a 2TB for now, another 2TB when you add 2 more cameras.

Ahh, the purple fringing. I though he was talking about the blue reflections from the pool. That's caused by very strong contrast. If you can reduce the contrast, paint everything black or paint the bbq white you may be able to reduce the contrast enough to eliminate it. Also, set your contrast down a bit on the camera, you are way overexposed on the concrete. Turn off BLC if you have that turned on as that will overexpose bright areas. Even on $1,000 lenses on my DSLR I get some degree of purple fringing in very high contrast situations but Nikon has fixed the problem in the camera firmware. Not sure CCTV companies are that sophisticated yet or even care about it. Even on Mobotix domes that cost about $1,500+ have the same issue.

Not so easy because the internal switch on the NVR assigned weird non-LAN IP addresses. So what you would have to do is get a PoE injector or switch, plug the cameras into it and use SADP to find them, remember the old IP and enter a new IP in your home subnet. Then you can use the browser interface to set up options like WDR. Then change the IP back to what it was and plug the camera back into the NVR.

Hikvision is a little strange in that it keeps stuff in browser cache and I primarily use IE but sometimes I'll bounce over to Firefox since new firmware doesn't show up correctly, like old menus stick around, but don't work right and maybe stick around in Chinese when you expect English or vice versa.