Kawboy12R

Have you looked at these Axis cams? Not PTZ, but really, do you NEED PTZ for a shelf mounted indoor camera? The upper end ones have PIR as well, so you won't get motion alerts when a cloud goes over the sun.

I bet that you will be the first on here to try it. 1- yes but not forever 2- yes but see above and add "definitely" before "not" 3- absolutely How long will it last? Haven't a clue. Probably quite a while though. I have a friend that owned an electronics repair business with access to lots of faulty consumer grade hand-held video cameras. Most of the problems had to do with in-camera recording. They powered up and output video just fine so he set them up as his personal CCTV cameras. It's not the same thing as using your Nikon but it's still repurposing consumer grade video equipment for 24/7 cctv use. As long as your point and shoot has power saving options that include "never" for the shutdown time you should be fine.

Nice feature for the garage door. I forgot mine once and then got a beeper that worked great except when my wife was home. The beeper drove her nuts if the door was left open so then I settled for a flashing LED in the bedroom to remind me when we went to bed. I haven't gotten into the whole "smart home" scene yet.

I don't have any Mobotix but it's hard to go wrong with Axis. Their new Lightfinder cameras are quite impressive and give good hi-def pictures in low light. I'm not sure if you could find a brand with wider industry support or camera selection either. As far as Mobotix claiming that one of their cams can replace 6 of another brand, they don't have anything that Axis doesn't. It'd either be in reference to a high definition camera having 6 times the detail of an analog camera or a 360 degree fisheye camera being able to catch a whole room from a single central overhead location. To my eye, if it's an issue, Axis cameras also look less like science fiction gamma ray weapons than some of the Mobotix solutions. I'm not an expert but I've looked into lots of cameras in the last year. You might have to sit down with a GOOD installer familiar with both brands and tell them exactly what you want from your cameras and where you want them in order to choose one brand over another based on hardware. Mobotix software gets slammed (even by their installers) for being unfriendly quite often though.

Post hi-res closeups of the board. Maybe someone else can find the right spots.

With all due respect to buellwinkle, he may be overestimating the warping abilities of springtime New York sun at 8:30 in the morning (when the problem starts). I'd be more inclined to guess a firmware problem that's causing undue softening under the lighting conditions at the problem times.

You don't like the ease of migration to network cameras in the future when running UTP for analogs? It isn't necessarily the best for analog, but in many cases it's a very good alternative to coax that makes future upgrading quite simple.

For a one-cam solution, I think you've picked a good spot to catch the majority of traffic walking into your home. 12' is awfully high to be looking down on someone close to the front door, so it'll have to be aimed out more into the driveway to get a shallower face shot. That also argues against the widest-angle setting (misses things right by the front door). So, to me, just above the door beats 12' by a long shot to catch faces, plus will probably allow you to use more zoom for detail farther out into the courtyard without necessarily creating a huge blind spot for those approaching the front door (hard to tell precisely when not to scale and no width specified). I hate to argue against Axis (love mine), but if the budget is ~$1300 or so for one camera, I think you'd get much better protection from more cheaper cams than one P3367. Like, what about your back door? Prime target for break-ins. Folks approaching the garage door from that side of the house? Thieves love garage doors. I had someone try to pry one open from several angles at work. They left wedge marks under the door and near the horizontal sliding deadbolt trying to slide it open, as well as had the weatherstripping pried partly off and left the door out of center (but luckily still locked) when they gave up. Have you ever forgotten the garage door after working in the yard (or whenever) and left it open all night? Fun fun...

Sorry about your dog. I haven't used BI very much but have had heard good things about the motion detection. That's frustrating to have cameras up but no footage of what went on. Tweaking motion detection can be tough. You don't want false positives all the time but can't make it so insensitive that it doesn't catch people, or only catches people close to the cam but not way out on the road. Good luck with the tweaking- properly set, it can save you a LOT of reviewing.

welcome

Bump. Sort of. Just replying to see if it fixes the problem where this message stays at the top of my unread messages list even after I've read it repeatedly. Sorry I can't help with the problem.

Some Sharp televisions have the ability to rotate the screen in a mirror arrangement. Not sure how many of them do or if other brands do as well. Might be worth a trip to the local television emporium.

I think I've seen everything now as far as ads and Amazon goes. I Googled CyKick and the first hit was an Amazon ad that stated "Cy-Kick CS Controlled Release Cyfluthrin is the multi-use insecticide designed for professionals like yourself". I repeat- on AMAZON. And it comes in AEROSOL. Sorry, must stop giggling.

Uhoh...

Lots of cameras if you need 11. Nice of them to throw a couple of domes in with the bullets. For me, PTZ for home surveillance doesn't have much utility. I can't see people for a long distance with the trees on either side of my property and there's a house across the street so I won't be sitting inside zooming in on folks. If I want to see them closer I'll go outside. The fixed cams will pick up everything I need to record. You situation may be different. As far as camera quality, I haven't seen any video from them so take what I say with a grain of salt. They might be better than what I say or they may be worse. I expect that they'll be decent for live viewing under easy lighting conditions (not mounted in shade looking out into sunlight). Night will be so-so, and with poor dynamic range (cameras that cheap won't be great that way) and unintelligent IR will make for poor night-time facial ID except under ideal and lucky circumstances if they're anything close to what came with my Lorex bundle and other cheap cams I've seen. Good for situational awareness and recognizing people you know and provide a general description of folks that come reasonably close. White male, thin, short hair, jeans and a hoodie, that kind of stuff. Recorded quality won't be as good as what you see live. In a nutshell, it'll give you good coverage (hard to ID someone if you don't have a camera pointed where they are) and situational awareness but will most likely frustrate you at night unless they walk right up to a camera and look up. Personally, I'd skip the extra cams with that analog package, put the 4 cams with the network package in the most important spots (doors first), and fill in the blind spots when I could later if my budget was frozen under $900. I've spent a bunch of time and money "playing" with analog stuff and, even after reading reviews and getting into some better cameras, with the cost of network stuff coming down and the astounding quality difference over analog in many situations, especially when viewing recorded video (most halfway affordable analog DVRs mangle the saved video), I regret not being able to jump into hi-def at short notice when I felt I had to get a home system ASAP last year. I put in an analog system at work a while ago and had some surplus goodies from that to mix and match as well. I'll second SectorSecurity on cables as well- 60 feet is good for about half a small house worth of reach unless the DVR is central, you can go straight up with the cables, and go out in a star pattern through your attic, which isn't realistic for most people. And don't stick your DVR in a hot attic just because it's easy to run cables. Heat is likely to lead to heat-related crashes in the summer and premature failure. Not a big deal to add a few hundred footers to get around the far side to allow you to mount the DVR where you really want it, but it is still an added cost and delay (most corner stores don't carry them if you know what I mean) for finalizing installation that most folks won't think of up front.

You've got lots of glare in most of the night-time images. First order of business is to make sure that the domes are clean clean clean, inside and out. The internal IR LEDs will light up any little smudge and make the image terrible. Pointing them away from things like walls will reduce the reflected IR light from the wall back onto the dome which will partly blind the camera. IR inside domes is generally a bad idea. Much better to have domes good enough that they don't need internal IR. Failing that, external IR illuminators with your current domes (with internal IR turned off), lots more white light, or bullets.

That's the one. There are domes available for it as well. The debate between getting it and the Swann is mostly that the Swann supports external alarms and PTZ cameras but is, I think, currently out of stock at Costco. Shame that there aren't currently available optional varifocal cams or longer lens options for the little bullets but the video quality is pretty impressive for the money.

Two other identical cameras or different ones? If identical cameras and you can get other cameras of equal or higher current draw running on the same cable then it's a bad batch of cameras. Either that or there's a whole lot of lousy cheap camera cables floating around. Did anybody check how large the voltage drop was when the IRs light up by putting a power splitter at the camera end of of cable? That'd help diagnose the cables anyway.

Seems like a camera issue to me. It's right on the edge of not functioning with the smallest of voltage drops. Either there's a pinch in the power wire on the camera pigtail or there's something wrong inside the camera.

Kifaru, your link won't work here. The owner of the place you linked to got into a disagreement with the owner of this site and references to it now get censored and turned into a period.

Two of the 66 were probably from Canada, and Costco Canada doesn't sell the Swann/Lorex IP systems that're currently popular on here for budget installs. I bought one of the Lorex ECO analog systems from Costco last year and don't recommend it. The last I checked Costco.ca sold the QSee (rebranded Dahua system) system that was the hot ticket 6 months ago. Read the looong thread on here about Costco QSee to get a feel for it. Not high end gear but the picture (daytime especially) blows away a lot of analog gear, especially budget analog gear. Get the 8 channel system and add a few different types of Dahua cams (if you can find them now that Dahua has slowed the grey market sale of their gear in North America down to a trickle) so you're not stuck with 6mm mini-bullets everywhere and you're in the hi-def cctv world with 8 cams for about $1500. You might prefer to find a Swann or Lorex IP system with the Hikvision cams from a US Costco and smuggle it across the border though. I've looked for Dahua stuff in Canada (search my old posts on Dahua Canada) and, IMHO, they're overpriced for what you get. Best deals on Dahua stuff are found at Costco, EBay, or Alibaba/Aliexpress. Costco is the place you'll find it with the best warranty. If you really want to buy locally on a budget and don't mind analog, maybe look for a higher-end QSee system at Costco and test it out a bit before spending hours and hours burying the cables in your walls and making a return a real pain. Run some wires out your windows and mount the cams where you want them and check the image quality (especially at night and in mixed sun/shade situations) to see if you can identify faces and possibly license plates (that's difficult and a whole other topic). Also spend some time reviewing the RECORDED video quality to see if you're still happy with the system. That's where most analog systems fall flat on their faces. Folks see the live quality and think it's good enough, but start to cry when the recorded face of the guy who broke into their car at night was a washed out blank mess. Also have someone at night walk around where you're trying to record and see if you could ID their faces from recordings if you didn't know them. Also, future-proofing your system by running cat5e to the analog cameras and using real baluns will make swapping to hi-def network cams in the future much easier.

150m is a bit too far without additional magic for a network cable run. The specs say 100m max for UTP (cat 5, 5e, 6) although you can sometimes stretch it a bit if you want to gamble. You'd need a network extender of some kind to get an IP camera working over that kind of distance.

viewtopic.php?f=56&t=27441

Get a true day/night camera without LEDs (or ones that can be turned off) and use a separate 940nm illuminator. 850nm illuminators are the ones that glow red. 940nm costs more but are essentially invisible.

They provide lifetime free tech support don't they? Call them up and ask them. Sounds like a tech support issue to me. Will VLC play the files? Did you try uploading one to YouTube?