buellwinkle

The Brickcom looks like the best out of the bunch, 3MP, IR, cut filter, PoE. For a nice 3MP dome you would pay the same or more, no? I think your impressions are based on the form factor determining price but in a different form, the price would be justified. White light LED's do have huge drawbacks besides being annoying. For one, because they are not on all the time like IR leds, your pre-event frames will be totally black and you may lose frames due to the delay as the PIR motion detector determines motion and triggers the camera. Those split seconds make a difference as the subject passes by the camera. Also, don't know if you have software picked out but Brickcom provides decent NVR software for free, definitely worth trying out if you go this router. If you are buying a few, I may be able to use my contacts to get a better price but don't expect miracles, I doubt they won't be under $300.

Wouldn't frame rate depend on processor? For example, if you buy a Synology NAS you will get an Atom processor, but if you run Synology DMS on an i7 PC, you would have better performance, no?

For my Mac, I had to install the Hikvision Mac Plugin and works well on Safari. The picture quality to me is better on Hikvision. For example, color accuracy, nr and sharpening artifacts are better. Dahua's noise reduction is much stronger which give it a nicer looking image at night but at the expense of detail. I'm OK with noise at night if the detail is there for surveillance purposes. For webcam purposes, Dahua would be far better because the night image is clean. I think you would be happy with either but which is better depends on your tastes. What frustrates me on Dahua is I can't turn the IR LEDs off.

I looked around and could not even find what use the RS-485 port has. It's mentioned in their manuals but not what to do with it.

I would not expect to see good motion video in 3G from a 2MP camera, it is what it is. Some cameras have 2 streams and you can set the second stream to be much lower resolution and frame rate and if your phone app can select the second stream, you'll be happier with the motion and switching to a 4G phone would help a lot. Don't know if that's an Android phone but I use the IP Cam Viewer app and it works well with my cameras and uses the second stream by default. Also, where your home internet access is, check your network upload speed. You need good internet access to stream video. For example 2MP at 30 frames per second may need 4-8Mbps upload but VGA resolution (640x480) at 15 fps may only need 500Kbps upload. Are you from Brazil or Portugal?

Can't imagine you'll find a cheaper deal than that. How do they make money shipping that all the way from China especially after PayPal and eBay take their fees?

The illuminators may be the same but I would imagine the image quality at night to be better, like the E32. The way WDR works on the E74 and E72 is different. The E72 & E32 use image processing to create a WDR like effect by brightening dark areas. The E74 uses sensor tweaking + image processing for better WDR. But it has to drive gain higher to brighten up the darker areas, hence poorer low light sensitivity.

Here's the delio, the NVR with 8 channels with PoE uses 15W power according to the spec sheet + hard drives, so pretty efficient and can run all 8 cameras at full resolution and frame rate all for pretty cheap, about $350 plus a hard drive, say $400ish with a cheap drive. BlueIris requires a good amount of processing power to run. Don't now how many cameras you have, but 2 1080P cameras at 30fps is no problem, may consume 20-30% of a modern day i5. If you step up to 8 1080P cameras, you probably need to dedicate a current generation i5 or older generation i7 for the 8 cameras. So if you are sharing this with an existing workload, it depends if you have capacity. The problem I ran into overloading BlueIris on a server is it loses frames, video gets choppy, so you want to make that never happens. Also, as an alternative to both choices, you can run NFS on your PC, then have these cameras write directly to NAS and you use the camera's playback feature to play recorded video. I wrote up how to this on my blog. Not 100% sure you can do this with the Swann firmware, you may have to upgrade the firmware to Hikvision 5 firmware. The load of NFS on your server would be minimal. If your server is Linux or Mac OS X then it's already built-in, if not there's free NFS software for Windows, like freeNFS but I have not tried it.

They do make a model with alarm I/O but nobody carries it. It would be the DS-7600NI-SP - http://www.hikvision.com/en/Products_show.asp?id=6429 The regular one everyone sees for sale is the DS-7600NI-SE like this one for $359 which is not a bad deal for an 8 port PoE NVR that handle up to 5MP cameras, but no alarm I/O but it does support alarm I/O from the cameras if you happen to have one with alarm I/O - http://wrightwoodsurveillance.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_6&products_id=245 And because you got me reading the manual, it does support Axis, ONVIF, Panasonic, PSIA, Samsung and Sanyo cameras if anyone wanted to know.

Raytec RM25 sells for about $300 and spec wise, comes in a 50 degree illumination angle, that may be the closest illumination angle to the HFW2100. It's rated at 14M (45'). Now upgrade to the PoE version of the RM25 and the price jumps to about $400 and I may be understating the price. Why is it expensive, because it won't break after a few months, LOL. Should you buy a 3200S, yes, if you need more illuminators, LOL. Seriously, for a better value get the Hikvision mini IR bullet, $169, you can run it at 1080P or 3MP and get it from a U.S. distributor/reseller, so you get a warranty with it and is the same size as the HFW2100. You can even telnet into it, same user/password as the browser user/password, why you want to telnet I don't know but you can.

When I telnet'ed into the camera I'm pretty sure there wasn't an ftpd running as I was trying to figure out how to change the logo on it for fun but possibly ssh. Also, much of the camera's OS was on a zipped mounted file system that is read only meaning you can't write to individual files but you can write over the entire volume and remount it. At best I thought you can take an image on an SD card and copy it over, but this model does not have an SD card slot. The best use of a bricked HFW2100 honestly is as an IR illuminator. They have a pretty bright LED illuminator and if I bricked one, that's what I would do. And it's setup to light up a night independent of camera functionality and small enough. Check the price of a PoE IR illuminator from Raytec for $400, makes this a bargain. When life deals you lemons, make lemonade.

For Dahua or 3MP Hikivsion wrightwoodsurveillance.com has both and Costco.com has the Q-See (Dahua) and Swann (2MP Hikvision) 2-packs

I like those platinum rj45's but then you need their crimping tool, makes sense if you do this for a living but a cheap crimper from eBay and cheap RJ45 from Monoprice has worked well for me. Get a cable tester to make sure it's done right. You can get a tester and crimper combo for pretty cheap, I think I paid $10. Monoprice has it for about that price.

The problem is buying from an authorized U.S. oem (no Dahua distributors in the U.S. yet). So that increases the prices dramatically vs. buying Dahua from China where it's almost seized to exist as Dahua actively stops resellers from selling out of their region. The best buy is still Costco.com, $299 for 2. Wrightwoodsurveillance.com has it for more, but you can buy one at a time and has a U.S. warranty. The problem in the past for buying from China is getting support. Imagine getting your camera and something is wrong with it, you may pay more for shipping it back than it's worth. Why do you want that Dahua bullet, do you already have a Dahua NVR? If you are not married to Dahua, the very similar looking Hikvision at 3MP for $169 from a U.S. distributor is the best deal out there. Sharper, better image quality, better firmware, less quirky than Dahua by far.

Vector18, do you have a contact at Dahua to help you with firmware bugs. I'm trying to get an ONVIF snapshot that works on most Dahua models to work on the PTZ and not having much luck.

Typically, there's one plug open, side or back, and you move the plug to the place you are not using. In the hole you are using, you stick a conduit adapter you get at hardware store that sells electrical conduit. The manual for the camera should provide the specs. Do not know if conduit is different in Europe vs. the U.S.

I would get the Axis microphone and avoid the hit/miss attempts with generic mics, mostly because Axis is unique in providing 3V, who does that, the world is either 5 or 12V. It is pricy though, warn you about that, about $425 or so and my distributor has a warning on their price sheet "no returns once opened".

Maybe there's something wrong with the switch. I'm telling you, my ZyXel 16 port switch has very little fan noise and sits about 2' from me 8-10 hours a day. The 8 port switch I got for my vacation home is dead silent, no fan. Call ZyXel support, if it was me I would drive over there. Normal Business hours for Tech Support are 8am-5pm Pacific Standard Time, Monday through Friday. Please note that any information you supply is protected by the terms of ZyXEL Communications privacy policy. Toll free support phone number: 1-800-255-4101 option #5 or support@zyxel.com

No contest, get the E72. First, the E72 is 3-axis vs. the Hikvision being 2-axis, a mounting headache for most. Second, ACTi will provide you better support (open a ticket online on the E53, it should not do that). Third, the Hikvision has light bleed issues I've been working with Hikvision to resolve, until they resolve it, I won't buy one. Fourth reason, ACTi provides pretty good NVR software for free and you already have an ACTi camera, so you can run both on the free software. The SD card slot is an advantage if you use it. If the Hikvision was 3-axis and they fixed the ir bleed issue, then you would have a fair contest.

So you are FTPing a still image every few seconds and displaying it on the web page? If it works with VLC, then VLC has a way to re-stream, albeit doesn't look great, there's ghosting and artifacts, but may be a good experiment. What sort of problems are you having with Unreal Media? Setup a few times, works well and is easy to use.

I think it's in their Tim Horton's coffee

Love to put a ACTi E33 5MP bullet next to it, side by side. If interested, PM what city you are in. Not sure if the image is overexposed more than it's not evenly lit, so the center hot spot is making the image seem overexposed. Maybe turning on a BLC option if there is any on that camera may help.

I believe all these lower end cubes are not PoE, but you are in luck as AVTech sells a PoE splitter for their cameras.

Me thinks it needs to be focused better.

Sorry, not ACTi, I thought their new models did but they don't. If the bright LED does not bother you, the best one I have is the AVTech push video series. I have the AVN812 and AVN80X, 1.3MP, super bright LED, lights up my living room pretty well, low noise image at night. Comes with their Eagleeyes smartphone apps for most smartphones where you can view in-camera recordings and live view. Can alert you within seconds of a motion event. That model does not have SD recording, but they have models that do. Has a PIR detector, never had a false alarm in 2 years. Downside is that it's harder to find. I also have the Axis m1031-w, noisy image at night, poor LED, maybe half or less as bright as the AVTech and VGA resolution but new models have 1MP resolution and better low light sensitivity. Sends me an email with snapshots if there's motion detected. Has a PIR detector, had a false alarm once in 2 years. Downside is that it's expensive. DLink is not a brand I would buy anything from as everything I've ever bought from them failed within a year. Unless something has changed recently, they don't manufacture network cameras, they buy OEM cameras and rebrand them as theirs, so hit or miss depending on who made the camera.