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To expand on BW's comment: This camera has the IR filter built in to the lens, not as a separate component like many cams. If you put in a lens without the IR filter, your colors will be off. Many lenses are labeled IR. This usually means they're IR corrected, not IR blocking; that is, they pass IR through and it focuses at about the same point as white light, so you're in focus with both IR and white light on day/night switching cameras. You want an IR blocking lens. These are a lot less common. Also, when you use a lens made for a larger sensor, you don't get the same field of view as the same size lens for your sensor. A 3mm lens for a 1/2" sensor will give you a smaller field of view than a 3mm lens for a 1/3" sensor. 1/3" is 0.33". A 1/2.5" (0.4") will give you a smaller FOV than a 1/2.7 (0.37") lens, which will give you a smaller FOV than a 1/3" lens. Each lens will give the same approximate view in different size circles of light, so your 0.33" sensor sitting in a 0.4" image will lose more of the image around the edges. Also, these sizes aren't the actual sized of the sensors, but that's a whole 'nother post.

It's not an easy thing to test objectively, but you can get an idea of what to expect by googling wdr demo video. There's even one for the SNB3000: Some vendors have very good WDR, while with others it's barely different from contrast adjustments. With an image that has areas both too bright and too dark, good WDR will bring out the details in both areas at the same time.

Here's the simple, real-world rollup on what the specs say versus what the cameras give. This is comparing the Dahua 3300C, which appears to have pixel-to-pixel sampling for both 2 and 3MP, with the Hik, which upsamples or downsamples one or the other. Hik 3MP going from 1080p (1920 x 1080) to 3MP (2048 x 1536): 7% increase in horizontal pixels, 20% decrease in field of view 42% increase in vertical pixels, 18% increase in vertical field of view. Dahua 3MP going from 1080p (1920 x 1080) to 3MP (2048 x 1536): 7% increase in horizontal pixels, 7% increase in field of view 42% increase in vertical pixels, 42% increase in vertical field of view. It really boils down to which field of view does the job you need it to do.

Not sure if anyone mentioned this, but Lorex and QSee are resellers, not manufacturers. They buy manufacturer brands with their own name on them, and each camera model may or may not come from a different manufacturer. You're generally better off going with the OEM, or figuring out which OEM made the Lorex or QSee model you're looking at. If you want to keep it below $300 per cam, you'll want to look at ACTi, Dahua, and Hikvision (there are probably a few others I'm missing). Under $200 leaves out ACTi. Do yourself a favor and avoid the budget cams like Foscam, Agasio, Wansview, etc, and the no-name Chinese ebay cams.

I remember when you did that investigation. The question is, if you kick it back to 2MP do you get the FOV back, one these newer cameras? I would expect so, but you never know for sure with cams today until you try it! Here are some comparison shots, for those who are new to the Hik's strange handling of this: viewtopic.php?p=224748#p224748

An easy test would be to disconnect power from all but one of the cameras. If it's a PS current limit problem, that camera will start working. The other common problem is too much voltage drop along the cable when the IR comes on. You can test that by either hooking up a PS with a short cable, or try a heavier gauge cable for power.

These cams have a smaller horizontal FOV on 3MP than 2MP, as well as a 4:3 aspect ratio compared to the 9:16 aspect ratio of the 2MP, so if you had a need for either of those, the 3MP would be useful. If you want the HD aspect ratio or the wider view, 2MP is better.

Here's the end of the Dahua firmware thread. I'd start there and work back until you find a link that works for your cam. Be sure to pay attention to PAL vs NTSC. viewtopic.php?f=19&t=33328&start=345

This was my conclusion as well. Better to have too much recorded than too little. I even have a separate system recording 24x7 for those events at the edge of the detection range. Recording time is only 6-8 days, but it gives a good short-term backup to the 2 months of motion detect recordings.

Also, if you can increase the i-frame setting for your internet stream, your bandwidth will be lower, but you're more prone to ghosting or distortion from dropped frames.

Is the motion detect on the cam or in the NVR? Cams don't usually have much flexibility in motion detect, while some NVR software lets you set parameters that will help avoid random motion of small objects like snow or rain. This usually reduces sensitivity, and with more sophisticated MD parameters, you can work the trade-offs. I've had good luck increasing the motion detect time threshold to reduce rain sensitivity, but this depends on whether MD works with individual objects or with the entire FOV.

My first POE switch was all Gb on 8 ports, figuring on the future-proof aspect, and when I outgrew it and priced full Gb 24 port switches, I decided the future could wait! My 24 port switch only cost a little more than the 8 port full Gb switch. With POE becoming much more popular and prices dropping, it'll just be a matter of time before full Gb POE switches catch up as well. For now, as long as the backbone has plenty of bandwidth, 100Mb ports with Gb uplinks seem to be the price/performance sweet spot.

Do your cameras have bit rate settings? This is the easiest way to control and calculate your storage space. If they set a fixed bit rate, fps and resolution don't matter. If the 3 cams run at 8192 kb/s (bits/second) bit rate each and record 24x7, each cam is recording 1MB (bytes) per second. That's 61MB/minute, 3.7GB/hour, 88GB/day per cam. For 3 cams, you'd get 265GB/day, or 3.8 days if you've got 1TB of space actually available. 4096 kb/s would double the time, but may start having quality issues with 5MP, depending on your frame rate.

It looks like you need to tweak the day and night mode thresholds. In your screenshot, if it's starting in day mode, it has dropped below the day mode setting, but not below the night mode setting. In that case, it would still be in day mode now, and wouldn't switch to night mode until it drops below the night mode setting. To get it to switch sooner, move the night mode threshold closer to the day mode threshold. From the docs: 1. When the Current Value is great than Day Mode Threshold value, the IP camera will switch to Day mode. 2. When the Current Value is less than Night Mode Threshold value, the IP camera will switch to Night mode. 3. When the Current Value is between Night and Day Mode Threshold value, the IP camera will stay in current mode.

My Dell switch is 24x 100Mb ports with 2x 1Gb uplinks. This one has had up to 12 cams, mix of 1 to 3MP, on it at once with no issues. The cameras and NVRs never seem to have bandwidth issues, but the entertainment center struggles sometimes for no reason I can find. It's on a different section of the network, and I'm concerned that the cams are bogging things down. I just need the time to chase it all...

You can re-apply a failed firmware upgrade with their TFTP auto-update tool: http://www.hikvisioneurope.com/portal/index.php?dir=Z%20OLD/Technical%20Materials/Special%20Tools/TFTP-Auto-Update/ There's a thread on this here, and it sounds like the reset button would help if you can find it. I'm not familiar with the Hik domes, though. http://www.cam-it.org/index.php?topic=5170.0

Note that non-compliant switches may not shut off the power in case of short or overload, which could damage the switch, the camera, or both. I'm not familiar with the Ubiquiti switches, so they may have overload/short protection, but that's part of the 802.3af spec.

If you go to the iTunes store and search for Aver, you'll see the apps. There are 2 of them, and I forget which one is older vs newer. Both are a bit unstable on my iPhone, though the newer one is better, but I haven't used them much for a while. I use IP Cam Viewer Pro, which is only $4 and works great.

They've had smart IR on the menu since 5.0.0, but it doesn't do anything. Hopefully they'll make it functional in 5.1.

I have no experience with Lightfinder, but it looks like those are 2 different solutions for 2 different issues - high frame rate capture and low light - but not both at the same time. Their docs on Lightfinder don't mention exposure times or frame rates, at least as far as I've seen. If someone knows more about Lightfinder, maybe they could illuminate us. If it can do good quality low-light color capture at even 15 fps, that would be well worth the $1000-ish price.

When I wanted to downgrade from 0200d, it wouldn't let me. Vivotek support got back to me pretty quickly and offered to do it for me, but was unwilling to provide me with the files and/or procedures to do it myself. I opted to leave it as is. Try their tech support and see what they say.

The 3MP setting is a 4:3 format, like an old TV, instead of the HD 16:9 format like widescreen TVs. It's also got a smaller horizontal field of view than the 1080p setting, showing less horizontally and a bit more vertically. If you need either the extra height or the 4:3 format for your coverage, 3MP is good. If you'd rather have wider coverage and the 1080P type format, stick with 1080p.

One plus of Blue Iris is that it has pretty sophisticated motion detect algorithms. This can make it more complicated to set up, but once you figure out what the settings do for you, you can fine-tune it, and even select different profiles for day vs night or whatever. It does require some CPU power, as BW says.

Other users have reported fogging issues; it sounds like a batch of cams with bad seals got past their QC. They've been replacing them for other people. For the IR hotspot, you can try things like opening the cam and placing a diffusing material over the LEDs. Milk jug plastic and Glad Press-n-Seal are both popular in the flashlight world as diffusers. You can't use it on the outside or it gives terrible IR reflections. This will broaden your IR spot, but reduce the effective illumination distance, which is the basic trade-off between throw and flood illumination. Of course, opening it up means you're risking seal problems, and may void your warranty...

Also, fisheye loses a lot of resolution as you go away from the center. If the customer only cares about the center of the field, that's ok, but your pixels per foot will drop way down as you get to the edges. Using a fisheye correcting lens like the Theia helps this, but software corrected fisheye suffers from this problem.