MaxIcon 0 Posted June 8, 2013 I posted this at another board, and thought I'd toss it up here, since there's been a good bit of interest in these cams. The main issues with it: - Soft image, sometimes really, really soft, in the shade when there's a combination of bright lighting and shade. - It's really big by modern standards. - Big, short bundle of cables coming out the back. These can't be replaced easily, and there's not much flexibility on where to put a junction box for them due to the shortness. If you run them directly through the wall, requires a huge hole. - Firmware is not very mature, and some features that sound good are fairly useless (like WDR and HLC). It's easy to brick the camera, even with known good firmware, and Dahua provides no help for this. If you have a vendor that supports brick recovery, they require you to send the camera back to them instead of letting you do it yourself. - Built-in security hole - it's got a fixed telnet login that can't be changed or reset by the user. Anyone with access to this camera on the internet could disable or brick it. This is a problem with multiple Dahua camera models. - No control over the IR. It's controlled directly by the photosensor, regardless of what mode the camera is in. It can't be disabled without unplugging the board, which can be done without affecting camera operation. - Can't replace the lens easily, as the IR filter is built into the lens. Shouldn't need to, though, due to the decent zoom range. - Switching between BW and color mode is slow, and exposure recovery after the switch is slow, resulting in long (7-15 seconds) periods of poor image quality when swithing from color to BW. Going from BW to color is better, even though the delays are the same. - Terrible (ie, non-existent) support from Dahua, no firmware support. Be sure your vendor can provide you firmware or warranty support. Dahua provides what BW calls a trash-can warranty - if it fails, throw it away and buy another. Good things: - Decent lens with a nice zoom range. - Seems reliable once it's set up and running, based on pretty limited time in use. - Software is improving steadily. - Works well with BI now, after the BI smoothness update. (this was for the Blue Iris board) - Decent night time image for this class of camera. If it were half the price and half the size, I'd buy more, despite the shortcomings, since most inexpensive cams have a variety of shortcomings. I'm looking for other alternatives for future purchases. ETA: It does come at half the price and size - the HFW3300S. If I can find a good source, I'll buy a couple. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
