Kawboy12R

I can't see any glow with this illuminator. It's never in absolute complete darkness but it is mounted under my deck 60-70 feet from a streetlight that has a tall spruce tree blocking light in that direction. If it glows it is verrrry dim.

Which cameras? Not all software packages support all cameras well. Want to run all 20 on a single computer? Some packages take more CPU cycles per camera, especially if the computer has to do all of the motion detection.

I think the lack of delete may be a "feature", not a bug. Once you let end users edit, delete, and otherwise screw around with the video record then it isn't reliable. Reliability is bad enough as it is without worrying about someone going in and removing parts of things that ought to be there. There should be a copy feature in there somewhere though. There has to be some way for spouses to keep tabs on each other and copy the interesting clips off, right?

Best option is to buy another camera with either no IR or the option to turn it off. The el cheapo cameras generally don't have a way to turn it off. IR simply doesn't work through glass. Well, maybe, possibly, you might be able to Mickey Mouse something and put a small foam ring around the lens but smaller than the IR ring and press the whole works against the glass so that the IR doesn't reflect off the glass and back into the lens. Tricky though and you'll most likely get tunnel vision and some IR bleed anyway unless you can hold the camera firmly against the window to seal the foam ring tightly. That's the 10 cent solution to a $150 problem though.

The $700 QSee IP system *IS* a Dahua NVR with Dahua 2100 6mm bullet cams (read the review on buellwinkle's networkcameracritic.com and search for the huge thread on here about Costco and Dahua). Low end as far as IP systems go but still IP with lots more resolution and detail than D1 analog. Middle of the road name brand IP cams go for your whole $500 budget per camera plus a computer with NVR software (or dedicated NVR), plus wiring, plus possibly a PoE switch. Really nice ones are $1000 or more per cam. For a complete plug and play 4 cam IP system with wiring and PoE NVR, $700 with Costco's warranty is an excellent deal. And yes, for an IP system it is low quality, but if you wanted to pop $4k-$5k (yes 4-5 thousand) for a "high quality" 4 camera NVR IP system then you probably wouldn't start out looking at a $500 analog system.

I'd forget the last one from SCA. It's a CIF recorder. That is 1/4 the resolution of the other full D1 recorders. CIF is absolutely useless for IDing from recordings after the event happened. Cheap for hooking up cams and viewing live (same as watching the cams from a D1 recorder) but no good for evidence afterwards. To me, there are only two choices in the ones you picked, and maybe only one choice. It's between the $129 and the $199 models. The $129 does full D1 at 7fps and the $199 does it at 30fps. There's nothing wrong with 7fps for home surveillance and the mild choppiness is not a big deal while watching videos, but I bet the snapshots from the $199 model look better when looking for plates or facial ID. I'll make two points though. The first point is that 4 cameras isn't enough to cover a home. It's a really good start, but you might want to get an 8ch dvr to save you from replacing the 4ch in the future. The second point is that if you don't mind going with the Dahua IP bullet cams (good points and bad points, but they ARE cheap), you'll get a MUCH better saved picture with greater facial and license plate detail for not much (if any) more money than an analog system with decent cameras. It'll cost you way more than $700 to get an analog system that's even remotely close to the quality of the 4ch $700 QSee IP system that's for sale at Costco.com if you're in the States. Look at the price of the analog DVRs you're considering, add the cost of a HD ($140 installed for just a 500gb hd in any of the DVRs at SCK or SCA), probably $80 in cabling, plus 4 cameras at $80-$150 each or more for something not totally horrible at night or in complicated lighting. Is the 8' yellow strip to the right of your house the driveway? If so, you'll probably want the camera to the lower right to be catching plates of everybody who pulls in. Night is tough for plates, but if daytime-only is good enough then you might get by with a 3.6mm lens for that corner. 6mm will restrict the field of view but get better pics of what pulls in, especially if you stay with analog cams. The remaining front camera might best be put directly over the door looking straight out or slightly towards your driveway. 3.6mm lens that close would give decent facial detail for anybody that comes to the door and give you an idea of what's going on pretty much all over your front yard. I'd stick another 3.6mm one or close over the back door. The 4th one I'd have covering my car. Not sure where you park your car or if that back building is a garage or not. If you always park your car inside it I'd have the 4th cam inside there somehow. That leaves big holes in coverage of the house through the windows but that can't be helped with only 4 cameras. At least this way you'll have a decent chance to ID someone who drives in what I assume is your driveway, enters the house through the doors, and has access to your car. Do you have kids? How big is your lot? If they play to the left of the house you'll probably want a cam pointed that way to easily watch what they're doing if you put the cctv monitor somewhere central in your house or pipe the video to your televisions somehow.

As long as it isn't pointing directly at the camera it should improve things unless you have an unusual situation. Cameras like light.

I'm not a pro, just a guy with a bit of a hobby. I've done up a couple of my own analog systems (one for work a while ago and one for home fairly recently) and bought a fair number of different cameras for different jobs. For daytime use with a decent analog camera, I've found that a 6mm lens will read a stationary plate under good conditions at 30-35 feet. Shorten this distance depending on how badly the dvr mangles the saved image. I've currently got a CNB VCM-24VF in my driveway for that job and it works quite well. Adjustable for zoom, vandal proof, reacts quickly to light changes, and decent in low light. It also sees IR and works well with outboard IR units, including 940nm. Available for $135ish with a bit of looking. Check out shockwave's videos and see what he uses for a dvr and cams. His pics look decent to me. I'm giving up on analog myself. Good ID pics are possible but IP makes ID easier and saved image quality isn't a crapshoot. Any old computer can save images as good as the camera can produce while analog DVRs in the budget range all lose quality, some of them lose a LOT of the original quality. With some reservations, if I had a $1000 budget for a 4 cam home IP system, I'd probably either get one of the $700 Costco QSee 4 cam Dahua clone IP systems and maybe add a different cam or customize the lenses if 4 6mm cameras didn't fit what I needed or get a Dahua NVR, POE switch, and add the cams I needed depending on distance and view angle required.

What's your budget? Do you want something that'll read plates in the daytime 40 feet away or give you a recording that you can read the plates from later? Nighttime plates are a different kettle of fish, especially with the vehicle lights on. Are you fussy about domes vs flimsy bullet cams (easy to knock out of position from the side)? You'll be MUCH happier with a $700-$1000 budget for a 4 cam system than $500 as long as you aren't fussy about reading plates at night with lights on. Well, *I* haven't found a good inexpensive cam for reading plates like that yet anyway but I haven't tried any of the cheap dedicated LPR or NPR cameras yet. LPR = license plate recognition, NPR = number plate recognition.

够好?

You would think that a notarized registered letter sent to a number of branches of these companies outlining their now well-known vulnerabilities might fix things in a hurry. Potential legal liability generally scares the bejeebers out of a company once it has been shown that a dangerous problem exists.

Hiding and armouring the dvr is good. Some have options to send emails with snapshots when motion is detected during definable hours. For an active business the emails would pile up if it did that during business hours though. Also, some IP cameras have internal SD card storage so they would have to take the cameras too. Replacing cams, dvr, and wiring for IP might be more than they want to spend, though.

Hope you have lots of white light. Your camera needs to see ir to be able to see at night. Block the ir spotlight coming out of the camera (plus blind it to any other sources of incoming ir) and it won't see very well without lots of help from a floodlight. Of course it can't see well now from the reflections, so...

You've swapped cameras and it's definitely the location and not the camera, so I'd just watch the tablet while moving the camera around the shed to different locations and see where you get the least reflection. If you have the cam completely away from the shed and pointed towards the house then maybe it's reflecting off a window on the house directly back at the cam? Or the halo is from a white light shining directly onto the lens of the camera from the house or shed? Try making a ring of dark plastic as a collar/tunnel around the front of the cam to see if that helps. Might make it worse if the material reflects IR even if it's black to white light though.

You far from the border? I get things shipped to a store with parcel service on the US side and bring things back myself every now and then if it's not worth the extra shipping and brokerage costs for immediate delivery. No troubles at the spot I use if it sits there for a few weeks or more before pickup. You'll probably need to set up a personal mail box number for the site you use. USPS requires a PMB # for deliveries to places like that now, and from what I've been told you're better off to use that number even if your package ships through FedEx or another courier because sometimes part of the journey goes through the USPS.

Sounds like you are dropping frames if moving trees have skips in them and people freeze and disappear. Analog wireless easily tells you that you have poor signal by increasing video static. Poor _digital_ signal usually results in blockiness in the picture, dropped frames, or loss of signal (and probably some more weirdness occasionally as well). Dropped frames in general can also be caused by not enough CPU power (in camera or in the dvr/computer) or bandwidth from cam to dvr/computer (wireless quality in your case). With a wireless system like yours, I bet that the cams are too far from the tablet and can't deliver much content to it. With digital compression, generally when a scene changes dramatically (say a person steps into the frame and starts walking around), either the data needed to be transmitted increases or the CPU power needed to compress the data does, and usually both. Try bringing the tablet right next to the cameras and see if performance gets better. I bet it does. Also, try both shutting off your home's wireless router as well as running LOTS of traffic through it (dloading large files wirelessly or viewing a hidef movie) and see how that affects your Uniden tablet. Wireless traffic (routers, cordless phones, etc) from even your neighbours can also interfere with communication from camera to tablet. Some cordless phones can COMPLETELY shut down ALL wireless IP traffic nearby. I troubleshot a wireless home network once at my inlaws that had intermittent trouble with their wireless. I couldn't find a thing wrong until their phone rang. When they picked up a cordless phone the laptop dropped completely off the network. When the call was finished the network automatically reconnected at full strength. Strangely, the phone and base station weren't between the laptop and the router. When they answered with a different cordless phone(different brand) then they had no trouble with their wireless. If I remember correctly, their GE killed the network and their Panasonic worked fine. This was AFTER they'd had their ISP send in a troubleshooter and had recommended that they replace their router, which they did. If their neighbour was the one using that phone I never would have figured it out. Our Panasonic microwave knocks some laptops off the net while running and not others. Wireless can be trouble. Moving the tablet away from your router and closer to the cameras (if possible) should help. Changing the channel settings in your wireless router might improve things a bit if you find that it is interfering with the 2.4ghz signal of the cameras. Some routers have an auto select option in the firmware to get around conflicts. If it has one and it's not set then tick the checkbox in wireless settings for auto. Dual band routers run 2.4 and 5ghz signals. If you've got one and you find that your router gives a lot of camera interference you might want to switch off 2.4ghz and just run on 5 if you don't really need both bands running and all of your other wireless gear can run on 5ghz. Hopefully you'll be able to get your system to work decently for you. The best bet though is to skip wireless if you want really reliable camera coverage. It'll save you trying different wireless packages in the hopes that one is better than another (most aren't). Good fairly reliable wireless is much more expensive than running wires and usually involves hooking a wired camera to a dedicated wireless transmitter. There is no bulletproof wireless if any old cordless phone or microwave or failing electric motor (or whatever else you can't control) can knock them off the air. You can even run wires out a window to wired cameras if you aren't allowed to drill. I'd be interested in knowing if you can tune your system well enough to work for you and how far your cams are from the tablet.

I'd ask either the local police or local cctv retailers/installers. Don't settle for one opinion, ask around and see who you believe if you get a number of opinions. Find a barrister if the opinion is worth the money to you.

Regardless of the laws on posting cctv footage where you are, slander and libel are illegal just about everywhere. I'm not in the UK and I'm not a legal expert, but at minimum I wouldn't post anything other than "here is my neighbour breaking down my gate". If he protests it, at the very least it would be an admission of guilt if you didn't get an excellent face shot. He doesn't sound like the kind of fellow to get a lawyer for civil charges, but if he complains to the police they might be forced to do something on their own. Someone from the UK I'm sure will chime in on whether or not you'd be breaking any privacy laws. I'd also make sure that your house was well covered with cameras. If he sees that you've just got a couple, he might be smart enough to come in from the side or back. Or wear a mask. Or disable the cameras first. And I was serious about the shotgun thing. If someone breaks into my house after announcing ahead of time that they're going to hurt me and my family they're going to get greeted inhospitably. I'll worry about the courts later for that kind of threat. You ARE allowed to hunt and buy shotguns there, right?

Where are you located? Laws are different everywhere. I would advise that if you want to avoid getting stomped even worse later on, putting mocking videos of them on YouTube isn't a good way to go about it. You might need to have CCTV warning signs up to avoid legal problems even if you don't post defamatory comments in with the video. Offsite evidence might be a good idea. If you've got good pictures or videos of them, mail them to your friends and tell them why. I'd be sleeping with a loaded shotgun beside me. When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. I hope you live in Texas. Good luck.

http://www.amazon.com/SVAT-PI300-SD-Functional-Security-Surveillance/dp/B0046MDZDW/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1357503351&sr=8-14&keywords=hidden+camera http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-WiLife-Digital-Security--Hidden-Master/dp/B0017U8FTU/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&qid=1357503559&sr=8-22&keywords=hidden+camera http://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Outlet-Motion-Detector-Hidden/dp/B005L42YX6/ref=sr_1_74?ie=UTF8&qid=1357505336&sr=8-74&keywords=hidden+camera I haven't used any of these but if I wanted to know what was going on inside my place without putting much effort into hiding cams then I'd look for something like these things. Video quality probably sucks but they look stealthy. Sound activated audio recording should be easy but might be illegal where you are. Check and see. If you can leave a computer running then you might be able to use Free Sound Recorder. It can record on a schedule and leave out silence.

What do you mean by chip set? Which motherboard or CPU? You mean the big CPU fan or does your board have a fan for the graphics card/chip or Northbridge chip (if it HAS a Northbridge chip)? I've always liked Zalman coolers for CPUs and video cards. Most Northbridges in my experience had passive coolers but if my memory serves some overclocking boards had a fan on the NB heatsink. That might be old-school now though. I haven't added any quiet coolers lately but if I were to look l'd start on newegg.com under "zalman cpu cooler", "quiet cpu cooler", or "silent cpu cooler". silentpcreview.com was always a great place for learning about quiet coolers, fans, HDs, power supplies, etc. I can't comment on other coolers because I've always used either Zalman or modded the 12v CPU fan to run on 7 volts. That's the cheapest option but not the safest- you have to make sure that your particular cpu fan will always start at 7 volts, and that it'll handle full CPU load in the summer with some dustbunnies added without overheating (cpu temp monitoring and alarm required). Not for the faint of heart. Buying something like a Zalman or other quiet cooler will give you peace of mind. I've always liked passive heatpipe graphics card coolers in my quiet PCs as well.

I was driving through central NB at the time. Bit chillier than home on the coast but not by much. No troubles with my unheated CNB domes except for icicles dangling from one of them. My Axis cams are still comfy in their boxes.

I'm betting buellwinkle never had the heater kick in either... I was out for a drive the other day and the car's outside temp gauge dropped to -24C.

I did a bit of Googling on them. Lots of DVR models to choose from, but from what I saw I couldn't easily find hard specifications of what they would do. The models I did find some specs on didn't impress me much. Might be worth getting one to experiment with if you're interested and can find a reseller that'll offer support and advice. I think I'm with Tom on this one though. I'd rather bet my last $500-$600 on an Aver Nano, even if (well, actually because...) Aver doesn't promise as many vague miracles as these guys seem to. I ended up not buying an Aver because of what it wouldn't do for me, but at least I could make an educated decision from what Aver published online without having to spend money to find out that it couldn't (or wouldn't do well). Someone is going to come up with a cheap, easy way to integrate everything together nicely though. It might just be these guys.

Lag from what and in what? Even if there's a delay in getting the image from the camera to your monitor, if it takes 3 seconds for the cameras to adjust, your monitor will be whited out for 3 seconds even if your monitor is lagged, for instance, a second behind realtime to allow for digital encoding, transmission time, or whatever. Wireless indicators? Are we talking about wireless IP cams or wireless analog cams? Make/model? Oh, and floodlights coming on definitely won't damage the IR LEDs in your cameras.They don't "sense" anything, so they can't burn out. There's probably a light sensor in your camera (small dot that's probably at the edge of the IR LEDs) if the cameras switch to B&W mode at night but that won't be affected by floodlights, either. The only thing that is light sensitive is the image sensor at the back of the lens, and it won't mind floodlights coming on either. I don't think I'd shine a laser into the lens for long periods of time but other than that you're fine. It just takes some cams time to adjust to the sudden drastic change in light.