Jasonpb

Hi all, Been reading through the forum and have learnt a fair bit but after some advice. I currently have 2x CCTV cameras (vandle/dome/IR) connected up to a DVR which I obtained through a friend who owns a security company. Issue I have is he doesn't deal in IP based systems as yet so doesn't really know all that much about them. I understand how they work on a networking side and will have no issues configuring them, the issue I have is more around product selection and the best way to go about it. The reason for changing to IP is because I am not totally happy with the picture quality of my current setup, the image is pretty decent overall I guess but it's rather hard to determine a persons face and without that it makes the footage pretty much useless. At night insects are attracted to the IR lights and the DVR (CNB) isn't smart enough to work out it's not a human, turning down the sensitivity results in humans being able to walk around a fair bit without the device logging an event. So I now record 24x7 and it's also set to log an event. Trying to find IP vandal proof dome cameras with IR isn't all that easy. What's taken my interest so far is 2x Samsung SNV-7080R cameras, one each for the front and rear of my house. I am open to suggestions here on alternatives but I don't really want to exceed the $600US per camera price tag. My primary requirement is to see clearly roughly 15-20m at night time but I don't want seperate IR lighting, image quality is also essential and the lighting can vary a great deal, reflections from the sun off pavement etc. I would like to be able to view the cameras remotely via web, android and apple phones. From what I understand the cameras can record onto an SD card or a network store, this is where it gets a little confusing. The cameras appear to do lot of the processing themselves but it's unclear what level of functionality I will have. If you can do pretty much everything I could do on my DVR then I would only need storage for the video to be saved which is taken care of by the FreeNAS box I have running 24x7. Is NVR software really worth it? I have read about some software that can detect humans, this would be a nice to have feature even if it helped in searching through content. Advice is much appreciated. cheers Jason

Ok quick update since I got around to installing these today, software from Samsung is a pile of rubbish, perhaps I am used to how DVRs operate but nothing appears logical, stuff is just all over the place. Little disappointing I can't stream directly to my NAS from the cameras or the PC (cifs/nfs) but lucky for iscsi, I thought from what I had read that would work and I could use net-i viewer to search for events, but no simply FTP and then you're restricted on quality. Then you have Net-i Ware, why not just focus on one product when the features are so similar, you just end up with two crap products. Day time pictures are rather amazing compared to my old cctv cameras, night time vision is pretty shocking, I have either got the settings wrong (there's that many to choose from) or it's a bit of false advertising going on. I can see better myself than what the camera sees. Maybe I made a mistake in purchasing these cameras, will have a play with the settings a bit more and post up some pictures.

Thanks for the advice but analogue cams just aren't up to scratch when it comes to the detail. If I didn't have a rental property next door with the current tennants causing a bunch of issues I would stick with analogue but the situation is becoming pretty crazy and I need to be able to identify them in video (see their faces clearly) I ended up going with the 2x Samsung SNV-7080R cameras, price was around $1280AUD delivered, ordered them about six hours ago. It's either going to be one very expensive mistake or a great investment, the added functionality alone is telling me I did the right thing will also have one less item turned on now (DVR) my NAS box was always on, same with a PoE switch. One of my concerns is how decent the Samsung software is, you don't really read much about it on these forums, though I didn't pay anything for it either but then there's the lack of support if I use another companies software, lot of features aren't supported.