thx123a 0 Posted June 9, 2012 Hello, Yeah I know the subject looks kinda odd but after almost a year I decided to start making the change. When I first started all of this I used a dedicated pc along with software (Blue Iris) and a pair of Panasonic WV-NS202A's mounted outside in outdoor enclosures. The image quality is great, unfortunately the company that sold them to me failed to mention that these camera's do not see in total darkness, they did tell me their customers used these at night all the time, but I learned later on for places like parking lots where there are other light sources. I am out in the middle of nowhere and there are no light sources at night, I even tried flood lights, but the result wasn't worth the effort. A few months later I added a 4 port analog capture card (PV-149) and also purchased a KT&C camera with night vision, to my surprise this worked really great at night as well as daytime. A few weeks after that I got 3 additional camera's with night vision(Vonnic's and some other brands I can't remember at the moment), all of these are working great, no complaints other than the occasional spider tormenting the hell out of the motion alarms and some foggy nights. The dedicated PC I ran all of this on is a quad core (Core I7 860) with 4gb of ram and 2tb of storage. The bad part, it has to run windowsXP only, the PV-149 capture card does not work in Windows 7, no drivers available. So you can imagine with all these camera's running it starts to really eat up resources among other things. After doing research on all of this I decided that the best solution is to get a dedicated DVR with support for 8 cameras and plenty of storage. Earlier this week I got in a Q-See QS-408 DVR and added a 2TB hard drive. So far I think the DVR is ok, there are some things it's lacking in, however nothing that can't be worked around for the time being. I have to rant here... In the past couple of weeks I made the horrible mistake of purchasing a Zmodo CM-Z2213GY PTZ camera. The first unit wouldn't even show colors correctly during the day, as their demo of it shows, the night vision on this thing was excellent though, RMA'D that one back and within a week ZModo sent me a replacement, and this one was worse, not only did it have the same problem as the first one, but the power supply was no good and the night vision was crap, after running it outside with my own power supply tonight for a couple of hours I noticed that it was entirely washed out, like the ir leds just went into high power mode or something(And there is no setting to turn the ir leds off or on BTW). There is no heater or cooling unit like they says it has, even though you can set the focus and iris to manual mode but it does not work, sometimes when you reboot the camera, the default language changes to chinese(lots of fun trying to go through the menu and get English set back). Long story short this camera is literal junk and is out of here. I attached a pic of what it shows currently. I can't believe some of the junk that's sold out there. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
PaulsonLaw 0 Posted June 27, 2012 Wow! Quite a rant... I've installed several zmodo systems now, never having any issues outside of troubleshooting issues on custom installs... I also only use bullet cameras, I never saw a need for PTZ as, for the $$$, you can have 8 cameras & another 8ch DVR for 300$, the same if not cheaper than having 1 PTZ alone..... So, nothing helpful, but good luck Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
shockwave199 0 Posted June 27, 2012 First off, I welcome home! I have the 408. Curious- what do you need to work around? I also have a kickass ptz and would recommend it if that's what you really need. Does very well in low light and has seriously great IR when you need it. Check my vids for it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
thx123a 0 Posted June 27, 2012 Yeah that was a pretty bad time I was having, I think I made up a few new words on that one. Since a few weeks ago I ended up returning the Q-See DVR, I was having issues with recording (kept getting error messages on the dvr itself and random reboots) and ended up going with the Dahua-FULLD1-8 DVR and have never looked back, awesome DVR unit. I have owned a few Q-See stationary cameras before, had no issues, but their new PTZ IR cameras, well i'll just say that there is a reason they are now trying to sell them on EBay(and cheap at that). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
shockwave199 0 Posted June 28, 2012 Yeah, hit and miss. My 408 has been great. But if or when it craps out, I'll be getting an Dahua for sure as well. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
