Digiscan

EZVIZ does not record on dropbox or anything like that. True.

It MIGHT not be you. When I got some Hikvisions last year I spent hours confirming that their firmware literally did not work to send FTPs. It did for some people, but not for me, and that was after checking everything multiple times. An update to firmware and all was well, thus proving my conclusion, though not before wasting many hours.

Hikvision cameras support EZVIZ. By support I mean they do what you say in the brochure, but I cannot for the life of me get them to work like that. Very, very little online about it, too.

Haha. No. You can get small cameras as big as a pinhole now a days and they are cheap. Maybe in the james bond days that was too high tech to believe but now its a reality, so my questions still remains... You really can't get one that small. There are cameras called pinhole cameras, but they are massively bigger than a pinhole. Lenses, even on really tiny cams, are still small enough that if you walk around the room and look at possible areas something could be hidden you'll be able to see a lens.

Just make sure a new system is IP based and doesn't use the antiquated coaxial. Some new systems still use that, but it suffers in image quality significantly and will never grow as quickly as IP is.

This exactly, seconded! There are very few WIFI cameras out right now worth buying unless you absolutely have to have wifi. The network reliability is lower and you're more likely to have bandwidth issues. There are a lot of cheap entry wifi cams like foscam, but you don't want to fiddle with those. Take an afternoon, run the ethernet cable, plug it into a POE switch, and now you're cooking with gas. You have the best approach. Great reliability, and it lets you use the best cameras there are, plus in the future you can put a new one there easily enough.

Very cool article I just found. Short answer is 80% live to the 4 year mark. There is a spike in failures early on, but those that last tend to go for several years before then reaching increasingly high failure rates a few years in. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

IMO the simple answer is no. It appears that mechanical hard drives don't have a limited number of write operations, from what I can tell with google. If that's the case, it won't matter if you rewrite the same 200 GB all day of a 1 TB or a 4 TB drive. Even if I'm wrong and HDDs do have a maximum number of writes, it's almost certainly going to fail from a mechanical failure (spin motor or reading arm) or some other electronic failure. And I would still stand by my no answer. Just for the sake of thoroughness, although SSDs do have a finite number of writes, some recent stress tests I've read tell me that this is an academic fact only and shouldn't impact purchasing decision. The lifespan of an SSD in an even heavy use environment is almost certainly going to outlive your usefulness for it. The failure rate in general of SSDs is significantly lower than HDDs. I personally believe they are the cat's meow and everybody should have one if they can afford it. They are amazing tech and really make a computer feel massively quicker. HDDs need to die.

Awful reviews for the Mini 0806 at newegg. problem is a lot of chinese knockoffs come in looking like the real thing. Cobra Electronics is a US company and has started making dash cams and also Garmin has a couple. Neither are terribly cheap, but they are at least from companies that have been around for a while.

Good luck! That budget will sort you out pretty well with possible exception of quality pictures at 30' in the dark. I have decent lighting in front of my house and even the 4mm, which kicks butt on my driveway, isn't getting much on the street (probably around 30' also). Ideally you'd want a tighter image than 4mm gives but if you can't park in the same spot all the time that's not realistic. You'll definitely need supplementary IR to really bathe the area in light. A high power spotlight on motion detection would work well but could bother people just walking up and down the street.

$50 years ago probably makes them near worthless now, but maybe you can play around. Be warned if you do you're very likely to get bitten by the bug and start buying some modern cameras. What do the connectors on the cameras look like? If they are modern IP cameras (which they likely are not), they'll have an RJ45 jack, aka a typical network ethernet port. You're right, though, that otherwise you need no special equipment for modern IP cameras other than a switch that has POE ports (not terribly expensive) to get power to the cameras. Otherwise, software alone on the PC can interact with the cameras.

Enjoy! I suppose you had a reason why you bought 5 X POE instead of a switch with multiple POE ports.

20 FPS is very close to full motion video, which you don't even need for a security camera anyway. Even 20 FPS is more than you need. I vote for 3 MP @ 20 FPS. You'll never capture something in those extra 10 frames you couldn't have caught at 20 IMO. I record at 15 (I could go higher) for space reasons, but at 15 cars and people look fine. You can tell the frame rate is lower, yes, but it's not like they are stuttering around the picture. How much movement can a person really do in 60 ms, right?

SD card will work out great for you. Choose a lens size that gives a moderately tight field of view, e.g. the hikvision 3 MP cameras with 4 or even 6 mm lens. Depending on ambient lighting you may want a secondary IR source, but you won't know until you get the camera in place, and the built in IR on these is pretty decent. Buy yourself a $40 switch from Amazon that has POE ports and then run the single ethernet cable to the camera to power it. Then hook the switch up to your router and now it's fully network enabled. Given what you said you want you don't need to bother with any other storage. As long as you trust the camera won't be stolen, the SD should work out great.

Everything I've read says go with IP on a new install (i.e. running wires). It is certainly the future, so you might as well hop on the bandwagon.