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It should help with spiders, but I haven't mounted mine outside yet. For instance, if a web is directly across the lens, the offset IR shouldn't illuminate it the way the concentric ring LEDs do. The single high power IR LED gets better reviews for coverage than the multiple low-power LEDs that most cams have.

Here's what I'd do with that budget: - An assortment of Hik cams, mostly 2CD2032 bullets and/or 2CD2332 turrets. 8 cams should run less than $1000 if you don't mind aliexpress. - An 8 port POE switch; whatever's popular. It's cheaper to add another 4 port switch if needed than to go 24 port; should be less than $100. - A decently powerful PC, 4th gen i5 or i7 with a competitive benchmark; you can get decent Lenovos or Dells for $300-500 on ebay, then throw in a few more TB of drive and a monitor/mouse/keyboard if you don't want to run it headless. Total should be under $600-700. - A copy of Blue Iris for $60, and either the BI iOS app for $10, or IP Cam Viewer Pro (or both). The door cam would be the only potentially tricky part, as good covert IP cams can be a bit pricier, but the rest would be straightforward. The plus of a PC based system over a dedicated NVR is the flexibility, but it takes more fiddling and maintenance. If you want simpler and don't mind less flexible, a dedicated NVR would do the trick, but I don't have recent experience with those.

Well, it's clearly talking to the camera, but not showing the video. This could be a video driver problem or a plugin problem. Sometimes you have to uninstall the plugin and clear the cache. Driver problems can be trickier. Another thing to try would be to download the demo version of Blue Iris and see what it shows from the camera. Even if it won't show the video, it'll show you how many MB/s it's getting from the camera, which could indicate that it's getting the signal, but not able to display it; this would lead me towards video driver problems again. Do you have a different PC on the network you can test it with?

Domes are more vandal-resistant, for sure, but can be prone to IR reflections in low light, especially if the lens is oriented near the base. An alternative to the dome is the Hik turret, DS-2CD2332-I, which has many of the advantages of domes but no IR issues. With smoked domes, you lose a bit of light sensitivity, but it's hard for people to tell which way it's pointing, if that matters. I don't have any experience with bad weather, but they're all IP66 rated, I think.

Can you connect with SADP, and have you tried IE and/or Chrome? I always set up cams in IE initially, since so many use ActiveX plugins. You'll want to enable compatibility mode.

Nice - thanks for posting! Looking forward to the night shots. There's quite a bit of color fringing (chromatic aberration) on the window frames. This is another 4k challenge - good 2MP lenses are hard enough to come by at a reasonable price, and 4K/8MP lenses are going to be harder. It would be interesting to see the raw Hik footage at 1080p and 2160P to compare screenshots and compression without the added Youtube processing.

There have been some problems with a bad firmware hack on Chinese Hiks to make them English. It causes the cam to constantly reboot, so you can ping it briefly, then it goes offline while it reboots. If it's doing this, the IR LEDs usually flash briefly when they first power up, so you can watch for that.

I've had good luck with Julia at http://www.aliexpress.com/store/638300. Not sure if they carry that model currently. Another vendor that others have recommended, but I haven't tried: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/202753

Typically, VMS software doesn't use a lot of graphic card horsepower, as it's 2D only - gaming cards are wasted on it. You do need decent 2D performance, and any of the recent gen Intel CPUs with on-chip graphics should handle that fine. The delay is typically either in the network or in the h.264 decoding. If you're running high frame rates, like over 15 fps, you might try turning that down to reduce the processing load. Many people run 10-15 fps for surveillance. You can check if it's your current software by logging on to the individual cameras' web pages to see if performance is any better from there. You can also ping the cameras to see if there's any inherent network delay going on, but 10-20 seconds delay doesn't sound like a network issue. Blue Iris is inexpensive and has a free demo, but it requires a pretty high power PC to handle 12 cams at MP resolution and decent frame rates. It's easy enough to test, though, and quite flexible in how the display is arranged. Hikvision has their own VMS software that's free, so that's worth a try as well. For low CPU impact, Milestone Express is good as a video server, but you'd need a client to view on the big screen, since it's the decoding and viewing that uses up CPU. To handle 12 cams, you'd need the paid version, which starts at $50 per cam, I think.

To run Dahuas on IE11, you usually have to enable compatibility mode.

Blue Iris supports ONVIF, but the spec is a bit shaky, so you never know for sure until you try. You'd need a pretty powerful PC to run it with 24 cams, depending on resolution and frame rate. You can download a demo to try it out first.

CBX was banned. He recently announced on another site that he's getting out of the camera fix biz.

"This is not the information you were looking for!"

Hikvision's DS-2CD2532F-IW outdoor dome has wifi capability (you have to make sure it's got the W in the model number). Some people have set it up to record to network drives and cloud drives, but I haven't done this.

Yeah, without bigger sensors, the low light problem will just get worse with higher resolution. Binning will help with low light, but then you lose the benefits of 4K. I'd assume these will need a higher bit rate and more powerful CPU to maintain decent compression. 4K won't be much improvement if it's over-compressed.

The Winbook TW700 has a micro-HDMI port, so you can run any size monitor from it. You could mount it to the back of a display and connect a bluetooth mouse and keyboard for a full-blown system. One of the benefits is that it's regular Windows 8.1, so it supports a ton of accessories. It's really an amazingly robust little system for the money if you don't need a lot of horsepower. Read the Amazon reviews for more detail. You can also buy larger Win8 tablets, but by the time you get to 15", you're looking at a full-blown convertible laptop that's pretty expensive. These are available from Microcenter for around $50 open box, but since you're pricing in euros, you probably don't have a Microcenter near!

Did you also change your PC to match the router IP range? In my tests, as long as the router/switch and PC are in the same subnet, SADP will find the camera, even if it's on a different subnet. My last 4 Hiks didn't need any address changes on any gear to find them with SADP and change them to my 192.168.1.x subnet.

There's a system called Arlo that's a stand-alone cloud recording camera - runs on CR123 batteries, no connections at all except through wifi. It's got a lot of drawbacks, but is the only one I know of that can do this except maybe some game cams. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=arlo If you have power available, there are lots of wifi cams out there. Others can make recommendations on which ones are any good.

I searched for a while for a compact device to monitor cams with, and the best success by far has been with a Windows 8 tablet - in particular, the Winbook TW700, which is small but inexpensive. It's got a full-size USB connection as well as a micro-USB for power, so you can connect any ethernet adapter that Win8 supports. Mine's using wifi, and pulls 5W. It's not powerful, so may not work for many cams, but it's hard to beat for the money, and has been super reliable for me. I'm not recording with it, and it's been monitoring a Dahua cam 24x7 for 6 weeks now with no drop-outs, shutdowns, or any issues at all. I tried several Android tablets, and they just couldn't keep running 24x7 without the apps crashing, loosing connectivity (both wifi and ethernet), etc.

I spent a while looking for a replacement board for the 2100, and couldn't find anything that looked close enough to be worth the gamble. You never know, though, you might get lucky!

Your best bet would be to get a well-supported name brand camera like Hik or Dahua, and use their free apps for both recording and remote viewing. These inexpensive IP cams all use M12 lenses, not CS or C mount. Replacing them is trickier than CS lenses. A good place to look is m12lenses.com, making sure you select the 1/3" section unless you bought a 1/2" camera (always more expensive). The Hik 2032 bullet cam can take up to a 12mm lens without much trouble. I have a 25mm lens on one for plate testing, but it didn't quite fit, and required longer screws to be able to mount the sensor board once the lens was focused. It's working fine in the day, not so great at night, but was a bit of a pain to install the lens on.

Sad news, and a terrible loss to his family and friends. This leaves a big hole in the online IPCam world.

Short answer: Probably OK at 4m, but likely to get blurry as they get closer. Long answer: It depends on the lens' depth of field and where it's focused. Most cams come from the factory focused for distance rather than close-up, so at a certain point, getting closer results in less focus. You'd have to test it to be sure. Getting good focus everywhere depends on the lens having a small aperture, which reduces low light performance. Most M12 lenses are not very big aperture already, but there's a trade-off between focus depth of field and letting more light through. Long lenses, like 12mm, are more prone to focus issues than short lenses like 2.8mm or 4mm.

My experience has been that corporate grade POE switches are far more reliable than wall-wart power supplies. When I needed reliable power back in the analog days, I used corporate-grade 12Vdc and 24Vac power supplies, which tended to be open frame supplies in enclosures. I don't hear much about reliability problems on consumer grade POE switches, but if reliability is critical, going corporate might be worth the extra cost.

That should help, but may be problematic on Dahuas. Last time I tested a Dahua on MJPEG, the video looked like Warhol filmed it on acid. They may have fixed that by now!