SyconsciousAu

I've heard that if you convert the claim in metres to feet you are usually close to the mark. The 2w LED seems to be standard across the cheaper illuminator whether they have 3 or 30. I have see 10 to 100 watt LED's in 850nm but no one I can find is building them into an illuminator yet. http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/100W-100-Watt-850nm-940nm-Infrared-IR-High-Power-LED-Light-Bulb-Lamp-DIY-/151489832395?pt=AU_Lighting_Fans&var=&hash=item23457f65cb If the minister for finance was willing to let me spend that kind of money I'd buy a Dinion 8000. I'm working on 352ppm which is the Australian Standard for Identification of faces but in testing I have found that 200ppm gives you a human readable plate using digital zoom. I ended up picking up a 96 x 10mm 30 deg LED illuminator for under $50. Cheap and nasty but it went down well with the minister for finance and I'm willing to gamble $50 if it doesn't do the job. The ad for my one did not give a claimed illumination distance but this similar one claims 80 metres. http://www.amazon.com/Night-Vision-Infrared-Illuminator-Camera/dp/B00NCN1JIO Given I am looking for a quarter of that distance Ill give it a go and report back.

Im only an amateur with some experience building my own cctv setups but this is the direction I think i would go. Hikvision make POE 3mp domes and bullets that sound like they would suit your purposes very nicely. Buellwinkel reviews them over at Network Camera Critic. I don't think you are going to get what you want with a stand alone NVR. Most of them are linux based and I don't know of any that allow you to use them as a NAS. If I was in your position with your requirements I would be thinking about building an I7 based PC with an SSD for the operating system, a pair of enterprise hard drives in Raid 1 for your CCTV Storage, and another pair of hard drives in raid 1 for your backup system. Get a motherboard with two network adaptors and a Gigabit POE switch. The POE switch connects to one of the adaptors and your cameras, the other adaptor connects it to the rest of your network. In theory that should keep things flowing smoothly when you are doing backup operations. Spend $60 bucks and get yourself blue iris 4 and another $12 for the mobile application. Set it up for direct to disc recording.

Ive got a couple of WD reds that are over two years old now and still going strong. I have them in Raid 1 so I should never lose everything. Never even consider using WD Greens for a system. I did and it did not go well. They lasted about six months.

It might help if you tell us more about your actual needs. Is that your absolute maximum? So you want your NVR to be a place you make computer backups to as well? Back to your needs, what do you want to be able to do? Read plates? Capture plates? Capture High definition face shots of intruders? Keep an eye on your beagle? Your roof may be a bad place for your cameras depending on what you want to achieve. For Overview high is great but if you want a clear shot of a face you need to lower the angle. Sound is also pointless on something six meters in the air when the conversation you want to catch happens at the front door. I use a windows I5 based PC NVR running Blue Iris which allows me to do those things. That's a good question. What help do you have available. Do you have the knowledge to build a PC from parts or is plug and play more your thing?

I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I am trying to avoid throwing good money after bad on illuminators that don't work. That gives me some hope. Do you know what number, size, power the led's in that camera are?

So I finally got around to updating the firmware in my Dahua IPC-HF3500 to the latest firmware. Software Version - 2.420.0000.0.R, build : 2014-04-14 It fixed a number of problems including not being able to see the live stream. I now however cannot record to the onboard SD card. I have tried a number of work arounds I found on the web. Reformatting with an SD card formatting program appeared to work as the card reported as ok however the problem returned when the camera was rebooted. Any ideas? Is there an older firmware version I can roll back to to eliminate this problem? Is anyone else having this issue? I also have the time issue but the camera's still report the correct local time despite the time zone changing.