Dahua Testing & model reviews

[salesguy 0]

here is one more of the dome indoors - I don't see any halo but I'm curious if anyone else does.

 

One other bonus shot, my front door vivotek FD8136, a tiny little camera, no IR and it's pretty cheap too. I'll write more about it later if anyone is interested.

 

thanks!

[Kawboy12R 0]

Thanks for the pics salesguy. Any chance of getting some night pics/videos (or opinions if you don't want to post your plate online) of license plates and a person walking up towards the camera to judge face clarity with a moving subject?

[salesguy 0]

I will see what I can do - videos require a place to host them, I could do that from my home server and just link to them in the text here, if that works I'll do it plus add some high res images.

 

Regarding your request - I don't have any equipment setup that will read license plates. It's to far from any of my cameras for that to be feasible. If that is a core requirement then you should be looking at a higher end class of camera, probably with a zoom lens.

 

Facial recognition is possible though, at least in the sense that there are enough pixels to ID a person from many of the vantage points i have setup. I'll see what I can do on that.

 

A note on software and zoneminder:

 

Last night I had 4 dahua and 1 vivotek cameras running through zoneminder, all at full resolution & frame rate. It absoutely killed my server, it was running at a load average of 11.5/11.5/12.0 all night. I have an i7 quad core machine with 16gb ram and several SSD's and it was not able to handle the frames at that rate. Max load average should be 4 or less, higher than that and stuff stops working well. My network is setup with gigabit throughout, except the POE switch which is a linksys 8-port 15w/port switch with dual gigabit uplink ports. So from what I can tell there is zero network congestion.

 

The server was seeing roughly 120 3MP images/sec (some were 2MP). From what I have seen of NVR specs, that would require a very high end dedicated server to handle. All of the dahua desktop & vertical series NVR's max out at 120fps at 1080P.

 

I have used Blue Iris on the same server and it seemed more resource hungry than zoneminder, but it was hard to say. I'd be curious if anyone else is pushing 100+fps through blue iris at 1080P or 3MP.

 

I'm not sure what the lesson is here, but sticking with 1080p as a max resolution and ensuring you have a solid network, good illumination, possibly additional PIR sensors (more on that later) and a dedicated NVR or high end server is the way to go. You certainly can't blow 90% of your budget on cameras and think you can figure out the rest, it just won't work.

[akelley 0]

I take it zoneminder does not support in camera MD? Does it support speed up on MD at the server? I know Milestone supports this, so in theory, you could drop the frame rate down to 1 fps for each camera while monitoring for MD, and then on MD event, speed up to 15 or more FPS for the recording. This drops the CPU requirements significantly as the majority of time, most of cameras are just streaming 1 fps, and when there is motion, maybe 1 or 2 cameras then stream full FPS.

[buellwinkle 0]

You can post videos on Vimeo or Youtube.

 

Are the cameras set for autoexposure or 1/4 second, wasn't sure about your comments. I don't see any halo or IR light bleed in your shots, good job setting the rubber grommet. Definately, the image from the 3MP bullet looks way better than the image at night from the 3MP dome. Look at the trees and such, they seem soft/blurry on the dome and sharp on the bullet. The some seems to have center sweet spot where it looks sharp and quickly diminishes as it gets closer to the edges of the image.

[salesguy 0]

I take it zoneminder does not support in camera MD? Does it support speed up on MD at the server? I know Milestone supports this, so in theory, you could drop the frame rate down to 1 fps for each camera while monitoring for MD, and then on MD event, speed up to 15 or more FPS for the recording. This drops the CPU requirements significantly as the majority of time, most of cameras are just streaming 1 fps, and when there is motion, maybe 1 or 2 cameras then stream full FPS.

 

Zoneminder certainly does motion detection - and your suggestion was a great reminder, I meant to try that and forgot. It made a huge difference in load on the system. Thanks for the tip!

 

It does take a few seconds to get back to full speed, but the savings in CPU cycles is worth it. Now i have it set to 5fps when idle. The only downside is if you want to record say 10 seconds prior to the trigger, you will only have 5fps during that period.

 

You can also use any trigger you want if it can generate a TCP message, which zoneminder can listen for and then start recording. Very handy if you want to use PIR sensors or integrate into a home security system.

 

Sorry for veering off topic.

[salesguy 0]

You can post videos on Vimeo or Youtube.

 

Are the cameras set for autoexposure or 1/4 second, wasn't sure about your comments. I don't see any halo or IR light bleed in your shots, good job setting the rubber grommet. Definately, the image from the 3MP bullet looks way better than the image at night from the 3MP dome. Look at the trees and such, they seem soft/blurry on the dome and sharp on the bullet. The some seems to have center sweet spot where it looks sharp and quickly diminishes as it gets closer to the edges of the image.

 

 

I'll setup a vimeo account and upload some videos for this thread.

 

Check the file names - they have the exposure detail in the name (hopefully it shows up for you).

[buellwinkle 0]

I see that in the file name now.

 

You may need a good powerful illuminator if you want to light up the area behind the patio. I use the Okeba which run under $40 on Amazon or similar ones on eBay and light up pretty far and looks well made. You'll need a 2A 12V power adapter. I run it at about a 30 degree angle to the camera, so I get the effects of both illuminators, where the one built into the camera lights up the first 30-40' well, and then additional one is pointed further out.

 

Also, crank up the gain to get a brighter image at night. The noise reduction does a good job of cleaning up the extra noise from the higher gain.

[finalwish 0]

I see that in the file name now.

 

You may need a good powerful illuminator if you want to light up the area behind the patio. I use the Okeba which run under $40 on Amazon or similar ones on eBay and light up pretty far and looks well made. You'll need a 2A 12V power adapter. I run it at about a 30 degree angle to the camera, so I get the effects of both illuminators, where the one built into the camera lights up the first 30-40' well, and then additional one is pointed further out.

 

Also, crank up the gain to get a brighter image at night. The noise reduction does a good job of cleaning up the extra noise from the higher gain.

 

how much gain did you push your settings to? I tried to push it up to 60 and getting a lot of noise.

[buellwinkle 0]

Different with different sensor. I believe on the 1080P sensor, like on their minidome, I pushed it to about 80 and while there was some noise, it did lighten the scene and going to 100 did not add much more noise and lightened it even more.

[salesguy 0]

An update here including video samples uploaded to dropbox, hopefully they can be downloaded and viewed. They are quite large, I set BI to 100% quality & recorded as AVI with h.264 encoding. Assuming you have a fast connection I would download the whole file & then watch in VLC to get the best quality.

 

What I have to show:

 

1. "livingroom" files are the mini-bullet 1.3MP camera, one with MJPEG and one with H.264. There is a clear difference in quality, especially on the kitchen wall. I'm not sure why this is the case, all settings remained the same, but MJPEG is worse for sure.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mgbxhhtcpcoi275/livingroom_mjpeg.avi

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuk5bqfhc5t1ri5/livingroom_h264.avi

 

2. 2MP mini-dome 2.8mm outside - this is one of my favorite cameras, the picture is great and the coverage is ideal for the front of our house.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l1d7epjaax2jcvz/driveway.20121015_160728.avi

 

3. Vivotek FD8136 as comparison, and I realized how out of focus it must be when looking at this video. Time to climb up there and adjust.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/otb7w9d139k2m38/frontdoor_vivotek_fd8136.avi

 

Lastly I have included a screen shot of the power draw in mw for these cameras, as you can see they are quite low.

 

Cheers.

[mickey75 0]

An update here including video samples uploaded to dropbox, hopefully they can be downloaded and viewed. They are quite large, I set BI to 100% quality & recorded as AVI with h.264 encoding. Assuming you have a fast connection I would download the whole file & then watch in VLC to get the best quality.

 

What I have to show:

 

1. "livingroom" files are the mini-bullet 1.3MP camera, one with MJPEG and one with H.264. There is a clear difference in quality, especially on the kitchen wall. I'm not sure why this is the case, all settings remained the same, but MJPEG is worse for sure.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mgbxhhtcpcoi275/livingroom_mjpeg.avi

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuk5bqfhc5t1ri5/livingroom_h264.avi

 

2. 2MP mini-dome 2.8mm outside - this is one of my favorite cameras, the picture is great and the coverage is ideal for the front of our house.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l1d7epjaax2jcvz/driveway.20121015_160728.avi

 

3. Vivotek FD8136 as comparison, and I realized how out of focus it must be when looking at this video. Time to climb up there and adjust.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/otb7w9d139k2m38/frontdoor_vivotek_fd8136.avi

 

Lastly I have included a screen shot of the power draw in mw for these cameras, as you can see they are quite low.

 

Cheers.

 

Hi salesguy,

 

Could you please post the link of the Chinese distributor, I'd like to order Dahua cameras? Thanks in advance.

[salesguy 0]

Out of respect for forum sponsors that sell these cameras I'm keeping this thread about the technology, not business.

 

It's easy enough to get on alibaba and take a chance with who you find. Those who have done that and risked their business & money doing so would not appreciate reviews of individual chinese sellers - sorry.

 

I will be posting the extra cameras I have in the classifieds or on ebay, in order to recoup what I have in them.

 

One note - when you buy from China the price of the camera is only one consideration, shipping is either slow or very expensive, payment costs 5 to 8% of order total to get to the seller & in local currency, plus there is a very real and tangible risk of loss to the buyer with no recourse. So keep that in mind when evaluating what a US seller who is a known quantity is asking for a camera.

[finalwish 0]

 

Hi salesguy,

 

Could you please post the link of the Chinese distributor, I'd like to order Dahua cameras? Thanks in advance.

 

You can get the 1.3MP mini bullet from Costco. See this thread viewtopic.php?f=19&t=32694.

[MaxIcon 0]

1. "livingroom" files are the mini-bullet 1.3MP camera, one with MJPEG and one with H.264. There is a clear difference in quality, especially on the kitchen wall. I'm not sure why this is the case, all settings remained the same, but MJPEG is worse for sure.

 

I haven't looked at these yet (can't do it at work), but my 1.3MP Dahua bullet was very pixellated on the default MJPEG settings. When I turned the bit rate to max, it improved a lot, and looked much closer to the H.264, but with lots higher bandwidth (maybe 2x, if I remember correctly).

[salesguy 0]

I haven't looked at these yet (can't do it at work), but my 1.3MP Dahua bullet was very pixellated on the default MJPEG settings. When I turned the bit rate to max, it improved a lot, and looked much closer to the H.264, but with lots higher bandwidth (maybe 2x, if I remember correctly).

 

I actually had it set at max, which was 10 or 15mbit, and it was still pixelated. The 3MP cameras pump out 24mbit max on mjpeg. while that isn't necessarily an issue for my network, the picture quality was not as good.