Logitech Alert???

[300winmag 0]

After almost giving up on finding a decent priced outdoor camera that can withstand the winters here I found the Logitech Alert System. It is cheap and rated to -30C!!!... with no heater lol.... the video quality... decent HD but have to do more research. It works by using the electrical wires to send data. Good thing??? I dont have to run any wires through out the house now yaaa!!

I don't want the software that comes with the Master system because I want all 6 cameras offline. I was thinking of running them all to another offline computer. What are your thoughts on this system? Good enough for IDing a perp from 30' away if I pause and zoom in?

I can't find anything else for $200 that can stay outside and have HD quality.... Thanx for the help!!!

[300winmag 0]

I can't find much on the 700e add on camera or the PoE B700e. is it posssible to use either of these with out Logitechs master system software? I keep reading its very limited. Would you suggest the PoE or the "Powerline Technology"??

[Soundy 1]

Wow... looking at the 750e, it has NO, ZERO, ZILCH, NADA, NEIN, NYET meaningful specs provided, just a lot of marketing hype. It claims "up to 100' night vision" but I see all of two red LEDs on the front of the thing. The "Image Gallery" contains lots of pretty pictures of the cameras, but none of it's output. I seriously doubt these things would work with any software other than Logitech's. ...and they want $350 for it???

 

This looks like a very expensive toy. Unless you want to be locked into Logitech's system, I'd stay far away. Take a look at the Dahua 2MP dome or 720p IR bullet if you want good, *compatible* HD cameras at a low cost.

[300winmag 0]

I almost pulled the trigger on 6 Dahua 2MP dome cams but the -10C rating killed the idea for me. The price is bang on for those cams but its just to cold here in the winter. Still not sure how Logitech claims theirs is -30C rated.

[300winmag 0]

Can you think of something around the same price/quality but rated for winter?

$200 each is a steal if I can find the right ones.

[Soundy 1]

All electronics generate their own heat, with a weather-sealed camera it will be retained quite well... they should work just fine. Cameras that do have heaters tend to have them to keep the optics clear of fog, not to keep the electronics warm.

[300winmag 0]

So you think them Dahua 2MP dome cams could with stand Calgary winters?

[Soundy 1]

I had a discussion about this elsewhere:

Actually most of our cameras have that rating but we have had several below 0 days last winter and not to mention all of my far north and canadian customers who have had much worse winters than us and i have never had a report of one pooping out in the cold.

 

We have a number of CNB VCM-24VFs installed outdoors in Calgary, never a problem - they're rated -20F to 122F. We've also been installing a number of similarly-rated HIKvision IP domes in Calgary and Edmonton and points between - I'd have to look, but I'm pretty sure they're rated about the same... none with heaters, none with cold-related problems.

[vector18 1]

Why would you want to connect them to a computer that is offline????

[300winmag 0]

More secure, less to worry about. Peace of mind really.

[vector18 1]

Ohhhh, you mean a computer that does not have Internet! My bad. Are the cameras looking at a combination to a safe or something???

[300winmag 0]

Something like that

Buying 6 cameras at once for use in winter when they are not rated for it is a big gamble. I just want to hear from someone who has had them go through the winter just to make sure im not wasting money because warranty would not cover them if something happened.

[ak357 0]

Something like that

Buying 6 cameras at once for use in winter when they are not rated for it is a big gamble. I just want to hear from someone who has had them go through the winter just to make sure im not wasting money because warranty would not cover them if something happened.

 

With all my due respect

don't make big issue from it

I am in Edmonton

selling and installing for long time

lots of cameras will work in your ( my ) temperature range

[300winmag 0]

Good to know, thanx bud. Looks like I'm back looking at the Dahua dome again then!!

[vector18 1]

Worst case scenario, ship the bad camera to me in NY and I'll ship it to the manufacturer as defective!

[300winmag 0]

Hahaha that would work!!

[kidjan 0]

Wow... looking at the 750e, it has NO, ZERO, ZILCH, NADA, NEIN, NYET meaningful specs provided, just a lot of marketing hype. It claims "up to 100' night vision" but I see all of two red LEDs on the front of the thing. The "Image Gallery" contains lots of pretty pictures of the cameras, but none of it's output. I seriously doubt these things would work with any software other than Logitech's. ...and they want $350 for it???

 

This looks like a very expensive toy. Unless you want to be locked into Logitech's system, I'd stay far away. Take a look at the Dahua 2MP dome or 720p IR bullet if you want good, *compatible* HD cameras at a low cost.

 

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.

[kidjan 0]

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.

[300winmag 0]

kidjan: Thanx for the comparison!!

Isn't Digital PTZ software related? I mean its the software you use for recording that enables you to do it right?

I'm looking at getting "Digifort", they say they can do the same thing but is there any difference?

I am also putting new lights around the house so the video is not so grainy at night.

Motion detection is useless for me, I will be recording 24/7 at max resolution. Just have to make sure I have enough

storage for 2 weeks at a time.... Still have to figure out how much storage that's going to be lol

Any word on how the -30C rating came to be??? Thanx again!