home2wa

Purchased the system from Costco. These were my observations: Pros: - Cameras produced high quality video with accurate colors, high contrast. Unlike analog systems, it was easy to recognize someone's face, even 50' or even farther away. I could actually clearly see what I was looking at, at least during the day. Resolution appeared somewhat reduced during the night. - NVR software allowed for very detailed scheduling of operating modes. - Option to install additional SATA hard drive of up to 4TB, all prewired and ready to go. Cons: - The night after installation of the cameras six out of seven cameras had severe condensation on the inner face of the glass right in front of the camera lens, blinding them. Q-See support asked me to take all cameras down for warming up indoors, then to reinstall them. Made no sense as they had been on indoor temperature before installation. To get the moisture out of the cameras I unscrewed the O-Ring sealed front housing with the glass unit, then dried the cameras for several hours over heating vents. One of these cameras still formed condensation on the inside several hours after mounting them back outdoors. Suspect moisture saturated desiccant pack inside camera cases. Took half a day of labor. - Motion sensing worked well at night. Despite masking areas of frequent motion, during daytime the NVR showed motion detection on all channels almost continuously, recording all day, no matter the sensitivity setting. That created an enormous amount of footage, filling up the hard drive in a matter of days, even at just 10 fps. My old analog C1 resolution Q-See system was much more reliable in motion detection. It could hold video footage for half a year from 8 cameras on a 500GB HDD. This system filled its 2 TB drive in about a week, then started overwriting. The problem appeared to lie with a quirk of the cameras. The feed from each camera went unsharp about every other second almost throughout the entire frame, severely pixelating the image. Then it sharpened up again. I watched this effect triggering the motion sensing feature of the NVR. Q-See customer service declared it a glitch in the NVR, asking me to send it in for replacement. - No watertight seal between ethernet connector and receptacle on cameras. Was concerned that moisture might corrode contacts over time. - Glitchy OS behavior: was hard to reliably select short motion events on the graphical timeline. Replay of all eight channels simultaneously did not reliably show footage recorded on all channels. It did so when limiting replay to max. four channels at a time. OS does not reliably switch between multi camera window or single camera window display modes on mouse clicks. - Software not designed for consumers, means it is not very intuitive or particularly user-friendly. Seemed very flexible, though, allowing finely tuned surveillance scheduling and response programming. - Due to large number of motion detections, email alerts for motion events was useless. Would have flooded inbox daily. - Annoying high pitched noise from fan on CPU heat sink. Too loud to keep NVR in office. - Not intuitive how to save configuration of camera windows to my choosing - One camera had cable insulation trimmed too short at connector, exposing the wires inside. I very much wanted to like this system. The video quality was far superior to anything analog. Unfortunately, with these issues the system was useless to me for home surveillance. Without reliable motion detection, I'd have to review an enormous amount of footage every day to find out what went on around the house in my absence. The excessive amount of data generated every day filled up the hard drive fast. During multi-week absences footage would be lost due to hard drive overwriting. After spending dozens of hours dealing with the glitches of this system, I returned it to Costco. I replaced it with an analog Q-See 8 camera D1 system with QT DVR, at a quarter of the cost. It works very well. Much quieter, good enough resolution, reliably working motion detection, user friendly operation. Will take months to fill the 500 GB hard drive.