buellwinkle

If you don't like Dahua, then Vivotek will be worse, especially in low light. I just got my ACTi E44, low light 1080P camera and it runs the cables through the camera through the mount like Dahua, so you may like that camera but not sure it will be $500.

The good thing is Dahua is always happy to provide a high level of support and customer service to get these issues resolved in a timely manner as customer satisfaction is their #1 goal

Of course it does. It has to decode the video anyway to live view and does so for MD. It's only when it records, it takes the coded stream and writes it at is where before it re-coded the stream. Dex, there are many reasons people want those features regardless if you want them or not. For example, many people don't feel comfortable being recorded in their own homes and want an easy way to turn off recording until they leave. There are many people that use surveillance cams for non-security purposes, like realtors, hotels, restaurants, bars with webcams, wildlife or city cams. The features are there if you need them and are unique, haven't seen these features on Milestone, Exacq, NUUO or other commercial solutions.

With BI, motion detection is done by the software and not the camera but it's actually quite good and provides less false positives and more accurate positives than what most cameras can do. Doesn't matter if you use direct recording or not, you can only view one recording from one camera at a time. There is no compression being done by BI on direct record, it's whatever you setup your stream to be on the camera. Obviously it has to decompress the stream to display it and to do motion detection. BI does have some cool features that other software does not have. For example, it has the ability to stream video so you can embed streaming video from any of your cameras to a web page. It can archive recordings to an FTP server, so you can have redundant storage in the cloud for off-site backup. It has a stoplight icon that lets you turn off recordings while you are home with one click and then turn them on with one click with a delay, like an alarm where you can set it and give yourself say 5 minutes to leave. The web interface works with any browser, smart phones, tablets, anything and it's light weight and fast. Works with just about any camera. When you consider this is $50 for a server, it's pretty awesome.

I have both an iPhone and a Droid Razr and hands down Android phones are better. It's rare these days that someone writes an app for IOS and not Android. My biggest frustration is ACTi that only has an IOS app. Used to be that IOS did not have Flash, but luckily Android finally caught up and now it doesn't have flash either since version 4.0. If you need Flash, consider a Windows phone. The one feature I look for and it started with Blackberry and moved to Android is a light to tell you when there's a message waiting. iPhones do not have this. Not all Android phones do either, so it's something I look for. For example, when I get an email on my iPhone and I miss the faint beep. I have to unlock the phone to see if there's any text or emails waiting. With my Droid, it has a light that blinks, for example, green if there's an email, purple if it's Yahoo Messenger. Also, there's probably no other software in the world I hate more than iTunes. One reason I gave up my iPad for a Google Nexus. If I want to add songs or files to my Nexus, I just plug it in and it looks like a USB drive to my PC, just drop the songs, pictures, files in. Even firmware upgrades on my phone are direct, not manual through iTunes. Lastly, for some reason, Apple is stuck on 4:3 aspect ratio on phones and tablets. This bugs me because most cameras now, most youtube videos, most video podcasts are in 16:9 format. I mostly watch podcasts on my tablet and watching with black bars like old analog TV's trying to watch HDTV format is to vintage for me.

With direct recording, there's no processing of the image by BI so the quality is exactly what you specified from the camera. Without direct recording, it has to recompress the image to it's own format and it can be jittery and requires tweaking to make it perfect. BI can only play back one camera at a time, not like most other software that plays back multiple cameras at the same time. I love that ability as I like to be able to see people moving around, transitioning from one camera to another but it's not a deal breaker for me given it's other features and price point.

Talking to a bunch of LPR vendors at ISC I found the holy grail of LPR and it's contrary to what you and I thought. First, if you use a camera for LPR, it's not good for anything else, has to be dedicated to the task. You need several things for it to work; 1. a good long lens that only captures the front of the car and nothing else. I'm going to using a 5-50mm Fujinon megapixel lens, about $85 at B&H to capture plates about 30' away. You can't use a typical varifocal lens that comes with the camera like on bullets or domes, for example 3-12mm is not gong to cut it unless you are very close to the car and then the problem becomes #2, which is viewing angle. 2. the viewing angle has to be as close to perpendicular to the plate as possible. Clearly it can't be perfect as you will likely have the camera off to the side, but this is the second reason for the longer focal length lens, so you can have the camera far away enough to get a better angle. 3. Here's where it gets weird. You need a good $1,300 IR illuminator, yeah, I know, contrary to what you may thought. What happens to you now is you take an overall shot and the license plate is a very small portion of that image so the exposure works on getting most of the image right and that blows out the shiny bits like the license plate. By putting more light on the area than you think there should be, it will make the entire scene bright and the license plate won't get overblown. Actually you will get awesomely clear plates, I've seen it first hand and you would be amazed. We are looking at getting the Raytec RM100 with a 30 degree lens or maybe the Axis equivalent. 4. you need a camera with great low light sensitivity so you can take faster shots. While 1/30 exposure works well for home security, cars moving say 25-35 mph will need a faster exposure and you need a good low light camera together with the bright illuminator. We are getting an Axis Q1604 box camera for this purpose combined with the huge lens and a large outdoor enclosure (not the Q1604-E as the larger lens won't fit in that enclosure). 5. resolution is not all that important. The reason is you don't want the wide shot with everything in the image, so 720P is more than enough. 6. optional LPR software. What it typically does is keep images of the plate capture along with a list of text license plates so for example, you can search by license plate number. You can also create an event based on a license plate match. This gets very expensive quickly. Not uncommon to spend $800-2,500 per camera license but it's not for homeowners, more a specialized thing for police and communities.

The latest release of BlueIris with direct to disk recording has made a big difference for me. Where I was pushing 60-80% with 3 cameras on an i3-540, it's now running 4 cameras at about 20-30% CPU. Cameras area all Dahua, 3MP, 1080P and 2 1.3MP. I'm running 15fps as I find that more than adequate to get reasonably smooth video while preserving storage and processor capacity. Clearly the Dahua NVR makes most sense if you don't plan on straying from the brand. Many of us that run BI do so because we have multiple brands of cameras or we change camera brands as the latest trend blows though the forum

Hikvision has a large assortment of cameras, but it's an unknown as most of us discovered them via Costco's Swann and Lorex offerings recently. I plan to do some reviews on other models but that will take time to establish a relationship with them but I'm working on it. Also not sure what models of Hikvision cameras will work with the Swann NVR, so you may find an awesome camera from Hikvision only to find out it won't work with Swann NVR and Swann will likely not support it. ACTi has been around a while and they have really good NVR software that's free and they have a wide selection of cameras. Their service and support for me has been very good and don't know how good Hikvision service and support will be, only time will tell.

Some of you read my reviews on the ACTi E32 and E33 and purchased the E32 or E33 and may have experience more noise at night that they were happy with. They had a fix in beta but today they release the production version. It's not yet on their website, so for now you can download it from my website - http://www.networkcameracritic.com/ACTi/A1D-500-V6.03.15-AC.zip I have not tried it yet because I just got it and I'm backlogged with other camera reviews so no place to even plug it in.

Definitely go back to the old firmware except for 1-2 cameras so ACTi can fix this. Maybe Ando can look into it once you have a ticket number.

You can set the location now.

Did you recently apply a firmware update?

Funny you say that as I had the same problem with an E33, they sent me a new one and it's fine. That camera should be warrantied for 3 years, tell them you want an RMA and send it to them for repairs.

I've only been using BI to do some camera testing and record some odd cameras I have around the house but this week, Ken made BlueIris an actual option I can use for all my cameras. Add to that his recent release of an Android app and BI has grown up. I just have one thing that bugs me and maybe I'm using it wrong. Most NVR software or NVRs use a timeline concept that shows recordings against a timeline. You drag the timeline or drag the background and it shows the video recorded at that time. I find the BI timeline feature difficult to use and would like to see that redone. Also, it would be nice to show multiple cameras at the same time during playback.

Even on high end cameras like Mobotix, it makes for pretty pictures to set sharpness high and you go wow, that's a crisp sharp image until one day there's a crime and you look at the images and you can't make out a persons face because the sharpening artifacts distorted the face when you dive deeper into the image. So I usually crank sharpness and noise reduction down, why, because I don't want the lousy in-camera post processing to mess with the image because I can do a better job in post-processing the image in photoshop to bring out detail.

In that range, the Axis P3364-LVE is 720P and has IR illuminator. The ACTi E44 or E84 are their 1080P low light champ with IR less and should be out really soon, maybe this week. Also, the KCM-5611 that has been out a while is a great camera with very good low light sensitivity, 18X autofocus zoom, excellent WDR. Most ACTi cameras I worked work the same exact way with video port 6002 and never had a problem adding a new model camera on 3rd party NVR software and just specifying another ACTi model. A company like ONSSI is reputable and should be able to add a new model quickly if you gave them access to the camera to test it.

Open a support ticket with ACTi, they should have come with a 3 year warranty.

We have them here in L.A., www.owltechcctv.com, authorized Dahua distributor. His prices are comparable to China, some things higher, some less. Had a booth at ISC West. Not retail though, for those thinking it is.

DSD also offers support and 2 year warranty.

Bosch makes very reasonably priced PIR motion detectors. I get it, you can point the PIR motion detector where you want, you can shield part of the PIR view to eliminate small animals from triggering it. Definitely the way to go if you need to be accurate. I used PIR motion detection in our vacation home and never got a false alarm.

Quality is pretty good in complete darkness with the white LED but can be annoying. I only plug the camera in when I'm not home.

Why not just call Lorex and Swann tech support and see which one will provide that for you, which one responds better. Since the cameras are the same, let support and firmware updates be the deciding factor.

Hardware is just that, all looks and works pretty much the same, but software is the differentiator and that's why we switched from Brivo to HID Global Edge/VertX products. HID has a huge list of software and cloud partners it works with. We use ControlMyDoors.com, a cloud based offering that's an HID partner but what I like is a) the ability to search on anything, b) the ability to trigger a network camera to take a snapshot and the image is linked with the access record. The key for us was to be able to search by name or address so that when a house switches hands, we can quickly deactivate the entire household. We have about 1,600 outstanding "cards". I use the word "cards" as the generic term for an RFID tag. We mostly use small key fobs and we provide an alternative of a card for people that prefer to stick it in their wallets and tiny thin metal disc people stick to an object they carry for example, slip or stick inside a cell phone battery door or inside a phone cover. We pay about 90 cents for custom printed color coded key fob. Also, while we use Weigand 125Khz readers, you can get MiFare readers, the tags are less expensive and you can print tags and if you ever ridden BART in San Francisco, when you buy a printed subway ticket, it's using MiFare to read the ticket, subtract the fare and write the balance back in a fraction of a second. We thought about it for visitors, you print them an temporary access pass and enter it in the system with an expiration date. This way you are not managing adding/removing so many tags manually for temporary visitors.

No WDR and it's older, one of the first to ship, had it on my desk and never did anything with it. Was going to use in my garage but not sure the IR LEDs work all that well.