WhoDini

Professional installer ....... In what .... Crap. Your cat5 is good enough so save your money. It's actually time, labor and money. Tonight I visited a store that sells Hikvision and has a qualified staff on duty. I asked them four questions, one being about the cable requirements. It doesn't hurt to get a 2nd opinion, given that one variable is cable length, of which wasn't given above.

Since no one has answered you, JJV, I'll say hi and possibly help you. I'm new here, and I did exactly what you did about two years ago. I ran CAT 5e and went with a store bought Swann system with four 1080p cameras (2 Mp). It was prety intuitive but there were some bugs that I didn't like, so Ive always had my eye out for a better system. Today, we have 3/4/6/8/12 Mp systems, but the problem with your and my set up and 8 Mp (4k) is that Cat 5e doesn't cut it. I've been looking at the Hikvision DS-2CD4A85F-IZH camera, but a professional installer told me that if I didn't use Cat 7a, it would look like VHS tape quality video. I don't know if I believe him, because Cat 5e can handle 200 Mbps and the camera's compression can compress 4k video to that limit. This is a guess, though, and before I install such a camera, I'm going to replace my cables with Cat 7a, per his advice. I've heard that Hikvision and Dahua are comparable, but each one has a small set of outstanding cameras. On another forum, some people there tried desperately to vector me to 2 Mp cameras, in particular to what they or their buddies sell. The advice here is to be careful about what people will advise you to go with. If they're salespeople, they could be highly biased. Maybe by saying this, it will wake up the forum, and they'll come in with their six shooters blazing away. At least we'll get a response!

I know this is a simple question for you experts out there. I want to know what the difference is between Record and Capture. I presently have a Swann system with 1080P cameras, and none of the literature describes what these functions actually do. Of course I can deduce that Record is record, but what's Capture? I will have more questions later on, because I want to upgrade this system, but I want this question answered first. Thanks.