zs1

Just got my Apollo 8Ch in yesterday and have it setup. I'm confused as to how to search for motion detection. I have recording setup for "manual" for all my cameras, and it's supposed to be recording all the time (as far as I see, it is). But I'm at a loss on figuring out how to search for when motion detection occurred. I do a search for "MD" but nothing comes up. I know there were MD events during the day because I saw the red icon appear on the cam screens during the day.

I see a few cams on ebay and such that have blue LEDs, or perhaps IR LEDs that are tinted blue. Any purpose of this? They look... cooler I guess, but there's gotta be a reason for the blue tint. Does that block out the faint red glow you can see at night from the LEDs? I tried googling the purpose of the blue tinted LEDs, but can't find a reason for it.

I just got a Swann DVR8-2550 with 4 cameras. The live view of each cam looks good. However, D1 recordings look like total crap. The image is very pixelated/blurry. CIF recordings look alot better. I don't understand what the problem is. I called Swann who sent me a firmware update, but that doesn't seem to fix it. Is this DVR just crap at D1? I can live with the 7FPS at D1, but not with the crappy recording. Doesn't even make any sense as to why CIF would look better. Has anyone else seen this? Got it at costco and well within the return policy.

Yep, it came with the "Pro" cameras, though they don't look too terrible. I only have one other camera to compare to, a Sony CCD Super HAD, which does look better, but not a world of a difference. I'll pick up some EFFIO cams to supplement, got any recommendations? The frame rate isn't the problem, nor really is the camera quality. In live view, the cameras look pretty decent. But when viewing a D1 recording, the image is very blurry, like its too much compression or too little bitrate, probably the later. CIF recordings look better in quality. I didn't expect this sort of side effect of the cheap dvrs. Most of the manufacturers don't list the bitrate used, so you can't really compare. And I agree on the menus and such. They aren't horrible, but not as 'finished' as I expected. I'm taking this one back to Costco, and ordered a QVIS Apollo HD 8 channel, which will be here tomorrow. I think that will be a much better unit, and have much better video quality. Looking at the sample on youtube of a Zeus unit (with a long range cam) you can easily see individual leaves in a tree across the street swaying around. Trees on this Swann look like large green(ish) blobs. If I ever have to identify the tree that robbed me, I'd have a major problem.