kidjan

So 300winmag wanted me to compare our cameras to the Dahua model. The Dahua is an interesting camera--it actually uses very similar hardware (the TI davinci line of chips), Theirs has better resolution/framerate (1080p/30 vs. 720p/15), although ours always has a secondary stream that's tuned for mobile devices. I see the Dahua allows a secondary stream, but they don't say at what cost (generally that second stream cuts into your primary stream). Ours has audio, digital PTZ (which is actually pretty useful for cutting out portions of the view you're not interested in), and we have indoor and outdoor models with IR illumination. The new indoor model also has an ambient light sensor, so it's swaps between day/night mode are flawless. Now on to the stickier details--they claim to have motion detection. In my experience, this claim is almost meaningless, because the real question is how well the MD works. We've spent a lot of time making ours work very, very well. Ours has up to 16 configurable zones, sensitivity settings and it works seamlessly with the digital PTZ. Our camera is very good at clipping out junk movement, although no camera I know of on the market is flawless in this regard (certainly not at this price-point, anyway). I'd bet $20 our camera's MD is head and shoulders above the Dahua. And this is a big deal, because it means your alerts are better, your SD card lasts longer, and you're not bothered with as much junk on a day to day basis. The software for the two cameras is really different--ours is more of a whole system, so there's no need for port forwarding, messing around with your router settings, installing weird active-x controls, etc. The downside to that is less customizable, so you have to ask yourself what sort of product you're interested in. IMO, our software is quite good--particularly our iPad and iPhone apps--although you have to pay a yearly fee to get all the bells and whistles on the mobile apps (clear downside, but it buys you some pretty nice services). The PC app is completely full-featured, though. Cost seems pretty comparable--our PoE models are about the same price. All in all, seems like a decent camera, but in my experience, the devil is in the details with surveillance products. I see so many products that claim to have "MD", and the performance is so pitiful that the camera is really just an expensive toy. In several regards, I think our solution is way more refined.

Well, at least you admit you work for Logitech. Per company policy, I'm required to disclose that--but more importantly, it's just the right thing to do. I don't want to mislead anybody.

Logi engineer here. I agree--there isn't a lot of specs. But let me clarify what we use (it isn't published, so subject to change, but other people on our official forums have done a lot of reverse engineering so I'm not telling you anything the world doesn't know): The video stream is vanilla RTSP, using H.264 video and AAC audio. It'll work with quicktime, VLC, a handful of players on linux, and third-party software like Blue Iris. The interface to the camera is custom XMPP; there's one open source project that did some reverse engineering. I wish we were more open here (ONVIF, for example), but unfortunately not my call... Discovery is UPnP, although easy to look up the camera in your router DHCP tables. This isn't an expensive "toy." It's a pretty serious system, particularly if you replace the stock SD card with something quality (I recommend the Samsung microSD cards; they use better memory--MLC--and more advanced wear leveling controllers). Our motion detection is--at this point--quite good (I personally implemented the algorithm), the camera has a full blown DVR built-in with up to 32 GB of storage (depends on microSD card), the IR illumination is actually quite good (I don't know about 100 ft., but I easily see to my garage at night @50 ft, and it'll record at that distance as well), and we've gone to great pains to make our alerting as actionable as possible (for example, we have algorithms to make sure the snapshot we send is as relevant as possible). We have PC, web, iOS, Android and blackberry apps. Also, our cameras are standard PoE, so if you don't want to fiddle with homeplug networking, that's fine. And there's no lock-in with PoE. Don't like our camera? Plenty of other systems that can use PoE. Or, there's also nothing stopping you from using our homeplug bricks--which output PoE + data--with some other camera system. The same team that did wilife did alert, but alert is a very different product from wilife. Obviously I'm biased since I work on the product, but I've dissected a lot of competing products in my day and I'm comfortable saying for the price, our system is head and shoulders above anything else I've seen. As far as temperature, I'm not sure how they certified it down to -30C; I'll check with another engineer.