Q-See NVRs?

Anyone have anything to say about the new Q-See NVRs? They're claiming the 16 channel has 1080 resolution at 7 fps or 720 at 15 fps on all channels. The 8 channel NVR has 1080 on all channels at 15 fps and 720 at 30 fps. Also both have 4 POE ports built in. They are selling the 8 channel for $700 and the 16 channel for $800, both without a HDD.

i was interested too in these systems. i see a nvr with what looks like dahua cameras on costco dot com. see link below..

 

http://www.costco.com/Q-See-4-Channel-HD-Digital-NVR-with-1TB-Hard-Drive-and-2-HD-720p-IP-Cameras.product.11767205.html

 

.pdf with nvr specs..

 

http://www.q-see.com/files/manuals/QC804,%20808,%208016%20Manual%20v1_web.pdf

That's the same system I was looking at. I wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts on them. The return policy at costco is great but from what I understand the stuff they've sold before isn't the greatest. I was wondering if they were starting to get some good stuff. The only downfall is the 4 channel. I need a system with at least 8 so I'm holding out hope that they'll get bigger systems soon.

i found a thread with some video and users review. user buellwinkle says wait, newer models soon to be stocked...he is an excellent source for honest opinions and reviews. (see his site NetworkCameraCritic.com) gave q-see a email asking when we can expect the 8 and 16ch models. i will post when i get reply. the thread also answers being dahuas rebranded q-see. i'm in when they offer the 8ch..

I purchased an QC804 and 4 1.2mg (720p) IP cams from Costco. So far I'm not impressed. While the pictures are better - the night time pictures tend to be too white. I have one day-time picture that is too pink and had one bad network cable. These cameras are certainly better for distance shots (6mm), but you can't get much clarity if you have to do a digital zoom. Everyone has been saying how great they are, but for the money I would say hang onto a great standard system until some firmware update are available.

 

One other strange problem I'm having .... I setup email notifications for motion. The system will send 4-5 emails from cameras after each reboot, but then stop sending them. I have no idea what is wrong. Maybe there is a setting that restricts how many emails are sent before it takes a break?

I bought two of QC-804 with 4 camera Costco systems, they came in as QC-808 8 channel systems.

 

For the money they are hard to beat, the whole system being about as much as a single decent IP cam yet have very decent day/night quality, but there are some issues.

 

First out the 8 total cameras from the two packages, one of the cameras has a video issue, it seems to cycle color or gain constantly causing continuous motion record and compression artifacts, so it's going back, but the other 7 cameras are fine.

 

The docs and setting are pretty cryptic so I missed that you need to enable recording of the "extra" stream if you want to do playback from a mobile device, it came defaulted to off, and my iPhone and iPad could view live video, but when trying to review records would simply say "no record" even though the PSS software would view recordings fine. Q-See tech support had no clue, which is no surprise, I simply stumbled on this buried setting.

 

Lastly the pre-record buffer seems to not be functional on the extra stream, so while you can view recorded video based on motion detection and get a few seconds a prior video on the main stream in PSS, the same video's viewed in iOS only show after the motion is triggered which many times seems to completely miss the item that triggered the event such as a person walking quickly by, this makes playback nearly useless on a mobile device and why DVR's have pre-record buffers to begin with.

 

Overall I am happy simply because of the cost, I am hopeful some firmware upgrades will resolve the issue described above, but it's never going to be polished like a more expensive system.

Called Q-See tech support today (via Costco). They were pleasant. Figured out why the email notification wasn't working correctly. When viewing the settings via the web interface - NOT ALL THE CONFIG SETTINGS - show if you have Windows 8 using IE10!!! The tech support fellow logged into my NVR and said the SSL and encryption settings weren't turned on. I don't have these settings on Windows 8 IE10. I then logged into the NVR using Windows 7 and saw the missing configuration settings.

I just heard back from Q-See tech support on the extra/mobile stream pre-record buffer issue. They are saying it's a hardware issue and there will be no fix. So be warned playback through a mobile device will have no pre-record buffer making review of motion footage much less useful.

 

Not sure why they don't support connecting to the main stream on iOS anyway, my iPad 4 can easily handle 4Mbit/sec H.264 decode, this would solve the playback issue as well on top of actually displaying the full 1.3MP video on my retina display.

Spoke to Q-see today about the email alerts. As it turns out, Windows 8 IE 10 doesn't show all the Web Service configuration settings. So, if you're using Windows 8, be carefull about the settings. Q-See logged onto my NVR and enabled the SSL and encryption settings for email alerts. These options are not viewable on the NVR when accessing it on a Windows 8 pc using IE 10.

So far so good, for the price I will say go for it, i think q-see are introducing the IP in a un beatable price, i have bought camera from china 2.0MP and they are not even close than the QC 1.3 megapixel.... also I prefer stand alone system than BS computer with software installed and dealing with microsift.. anyways.. you can not get somethign megapixel better than the solution.... I am pretty sure they will raise the pirce very very high for the next year!!!

 

the only problem was: trying to connect a different brand camera, spoke with Q-see and no accurate answer.. anyways... if I have 10K to invest i will spend it all in this new solution and install to my customer!!!

Has anyone gotten any info on a firmware update on the QC-804 to enable more cameras. Contrary to what Q-See has said on their facebook page and support, the QC-804 does NOT allow extra cameras to be connected after the internal switch. I finally got some time on my hands to hook up a PoE switch behind it, and no matter what I do, the NVR will only find 4 of those cameras. I could be making a technical error, but so far it doesn't seem so.

 

On the good news side of things, I was finally able to log directly into one of my 2 spare cameras and I did find the setting to turn it into color only mode. Which for 3 of my cameras, is best because they point to areas that are illuminated by street lights. When they did change to B&W mode, I lost lots of quality. Color mode actually stays pretty decent in low light.

AaronHolio, how were you able to access the camera settings directly? I recently setup Blue Iris to monitor my QC804 cameras directly. Used a pre-configure setting for Dahua cameras to access the video streams directly from the IP cameras. I was looking for an alternative that would not show motion during rains (which is all winter in Oregon).

 

 

Shawn

Yes, I accessed it via ConfigTool.exe by plugging it into a PoE switch that is on my local lan (vs. being on the PoE subnet that is behind the NVR. ConfigTool comes on the discs with both the cameras and the NVR). If you don't have a PoE switch, you can power the camera with a 12v power supply and plug it into your main network (The cameras have both a RJ45 and a DC power plug on them). It will then request DHCP from your router.

 

I should clarify, ConfigTool.exe just finds it on my network, you right click on the camera when it finds it and you can select "open web device", which then brings it up in Internut Explorer. So, technically you can just look on your router's DHCP client list and find it there too. It defaults on port 85. So http://:85/ and then you login with admin admin until you change the PW.

 

It is a bit of a shame that they don't allow you to configure all the options via the NVR that you can by directly hitting it via the web service.

 

I've gone thru about 5 different pieces of PC based IP camera NVR software. It seems none of them give me the stability of the NVR handling things, that or they simply didn't have drivers for it. I have two different apps on my Android phone that access the NVR pretty well. I haven't tried accessing them directly with my phone, but one person told me they were getting some bad image corruption problems, which I got the same via my PC (accessing the RTSP stream).

If your still following this post - I see Q-See has a firmware update for the QC804/8/16. Not sure what fixes are included.

If your still following this post - I see Q-See has a firmware update for the QC804/8/16. Not sure what fixes are included.

I don't see it on their site. Are they only giving it out upon request? I'd sure like it if someone attempted to use the 8016 firmware on the 804 since from what everyone can tell, it is all the same hardware. viewtopic.php?f=19&t=33196&p=217187#p217187

I found it on their FAQ section under Support.

I found it on their FAQ section under Support.

Oh there it is. http://qsee.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1877 Looks like they made it a single update.bin (14.4MB) for all 3 models. Doesn't look like it does too much unless you are running cameras other than their branded models.

This Firmware has the following fixes and functions:

- 1. Improves ONVIF IP Camera support