MaxIcon

And generally, cams with alarm inputs are bigger, if that's an issue. None of the compact bullets seem to have alarm inputs.

If you need a wide FOV, be aware that the 3MP mode has a narrower FOV than the 1080p on the Hik. Not sure why they do this, but it's well documented. Here are the measured FOVs for the Hik 3MP bullet with a 4mm lens: 1080P: 77 degrees (spec is 75.8 degrees) 3MP: 69 degrees (they don't spec 3MP FOV)

Are the purplish ones the bullets or domes? My bullets tend to do this, and I'm curious if the domes do as well.

Alex, Poor lighting would still have a good signal, but with no details visible, just a dark image. OP's problem is signal loss - his signal goes away when the IR LEDs come on at night.

Here you go: ftp://ftp.hikvisionusa.com user name: hikfirmware Password Hikvision123 (note the H is capitol )

The Swann labeled Hik bullet that I tested a while back used the de facto standard 2.1 x 5.5 mm connector that most surveillance gear uses. I think the smaller size is mostly used by Foscam.

OP's looking for a battery operated camera. Best selection is going to be trail cams or hunting cams, but they're not very small. Go to Amazon and search on trail camera, and check the sizes and reviews. The other common format for these is nanny cams, teddy bear cams, smoke alarm cams, and such - stealth cams that are usually, but not always, self-powered. A search on these terms will show up a wide variety.

Here's what I posted in a PM about this: If the wires are too small and have too much resistance, more current won't help, since it's the higher current to drive the IR that causes the voltage to drop. If the camera's drawing more current than the PS can provide, then a higher current PS will do the trick. There are 2 easy tests - one would be to use the 2 supplies, like was mentioned in the post. If one supply driving 2 cams wasn't good enough, then using 2 supplies should take care of it. The other would be to connect the supply closer to the camera by running an extension cord or whatever, and connecting the supply using a short cable run just for testing. It's also possible that one of the supplies is going bad - if these are standard wall wart supply modules, they often have quality control problems, but that's easy to test by swapping your two supplies between the cameras. If the wire turns out to be too small gauge, there's no easy solution to this except for running another alongside it. If you can get a supply with variable output, you can fix the problem by turning up the voltage at the power supply. This can be a little risky, since this would make your voltage go higher when the LEDs are off. Here's how this works. If your wires have 1 ohm resistance, your PS is 12V, and the camera draws 1A at night, that would be 12W that the power supply puts out. The 1 ohm resistance would use up 1W, and would also drop the voltage by 1V, so you'd only have 11V at the camera. If the power drops by half during the day, that's 0.5A and 6W. Now, the wire resistance would use up 1/2W and drop the voltage by 1/2V, so you'd be at 11.5V. If you turned the voltage up to 13V give you 12V at the camera at night, then in the day it would increase to 12.5V at the camera. That's probably not enough to cause trouble, but it's good to check it out. You can test how much drop you get by using a volt meter to measure the actual voltage at the camera during the day and the night. If you're lucky, the higher current PS will take care of things, and you're good to go. Otherwise, it's either another wire run or an adjustable PS.

The other thing that might be causing your problem is too small a wire gauge in your power cables, especially if they're long runs. If the higher current PS doesn't take care of it, try this.

You might want to clear your browser cache and remove the active-x software, if you're using that, so that it reloads fresh when you start it up. Sometimes the old software causes trouble if it's left behind. My Dahua camera has an uninstall program in the start/program files/webplugin.exe folder, and the files are installed under /program files/webrec. Yours may have a different location, or it may be different for the NVR. If that doesn't help, it may be a bug, and good luck with the Dahua support.

If you see the same field of view on both D1 and 1080p, it means that either the D1 is a squeezed down 16:9 image (this seems like the most likely case), or the 1080p is a stretched 4:3 image. You can't see the same image on both without one or the other being distorted, by definition. This is a choice the software developers make - whether to keep the aspect ratio correct or change it to fit one way or the other. My 3300C, which is the same as the 3200C except for the extra 3MP setting, shows the same image height on D1 and 720p, but the 720p shows more image on the right and left. This is what the camera sends out. The smartphone software may change this and display things differently, but that depends on that software. The version of IP Cam Viewer Pro on my iPhone shows all cameras the same in the matrix view, but shows the correct aspect ratio in individual camera view. As for the analog output, the image it changes based on the camera setting, and it shows nearly the entire field of view of the digital image, except the width is cut down on the 16:9 settings to fit the analog view.

You might want to post over at the Blue Iris forum - cam-it.org - as they're a good resource for BI problems. One thing that can help dropouts in BI is to set your i-frame the same as your fps. So, if you're running 15 fps, set the i-frame to 15 as well.

Some IP cams will write to network drives or NFS shares, or will send video files via FTP. This will be in one of your setup screens if your camera allows this. Most IP cams come with simple recording software, but if your vendor doesn't supply it, you may be out of luck there. Another option is to run Blue Iris, which is pretty inexpensive and supports a wide variety of cams. You can download a demo version to test it. You might get better response in the IP camera forum, and posting the model of camera would help.

1080p and D1 have different aspect ratios. 1080p is 16:9 (HD, aka widescreen), and D1 is 4:3 (SD, like old-style TVs), so they can't show the same area unless one's distorted - either stretched or squashed, depending on which way you go. I don't think the Dahua allows you to do that except in the web browser. The HFW3300C doesn't have a 4:3 setting above D1 - both MP settings, 720p and 1080p, are HD aspect ratio. Likewise, it doesn't have a 16:9 setting below 720p; everything below that is SD aspect ratio. The 3MP 3300C uses 4:3 for the 3MP setting, but you don't have that on yours.

Which ones did you end up buying? Looking forward to some output pics! The original link was 30 LEDs at 36W, or a little over 1W per LED, and yes, they'll get quite hot. The problem is that most flexible LED strips don't have good heatsinking, and I'd guess the encapsulation causes more heat buildup. It's not uncommon for high power LEDs to run at 120 degrees F or more, depending on the heatsink and ambient temp. Heat's the #1 killer of LEDs, so it'll be interesting to see how they hold up. Here's an article on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_management_of_high-power_LEDs Note that's 120°C, which is 248°F, so even at 120°F you're still in a safe zone!

The Dahua HFW-3200C (2MP) or 3300C (3MP) have an analog BNC output. I've never used the one on mine, but you can enable or disable it in the firmware. ETA: I plugged in my analog monitor input to the 3300C, and it looks pretty good. It's the same overall view as whatever the camera's set at, but with some trimmed off all around. The trimming is worse on widescreen modes, of course, since the analog output is non-widescreen.

I have 2 of these running under BI (not Wrightwood, but virtually identical), running 5.0.0, and don't see these issues. One of mine had dropped off-line for several hours yesterday, but it was down hard. It wouldn't respond to a ping or connect via browser, and BI resets made no difference, though the switch LEDs were still blinking away. I finally power-cycled it and it came back on-line. This is a little concerning, as none of my other IP cams have done this over the years, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and see if it happens any more.

Agree about the digital zoom - you can get the exact same zoom after the fact without losing the big picture. I disable digital zoom on everything that uses it. The interesting thing about 20x vs 30x is that 30x is only 1.5x more zoom than 20x. It sounds like a big increase (10x more!), but it's not. This is a frequent disappointment to people who spend a lot more money on relatively small increases.

Just to boil it down a bit: It totally depends on the software you use. In general, if your software only records, you can get by with less CPU overall. If it displays the cameras and/or transcodes the video, it will take a lot more. As mentioned above, motion detect and other features (on-camera displays, pre-trigger video cache, etc) will increase your CPU as well.

Aside from the max frame rate issue, there's the anti-flicker setting, which causes trouble when using 50 Hz settings in a 60 Hz environment, and vice versa. This is discussed in this post: viewtopic.php?p=226075#p226075 Some cameras have this as a separate setting, but on this problem was on a Dahua.

Here are some places that sell IR filters that may or may not fit your camera: http://peauproductions.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2_12 http://www.m12lenses.com/IR-Cut-Filters-s/59.htm http://www.ebay.com/itm/cctv-lens-camera-filter-IR-cut-new-/281148123133?pt=US_Surveillance_Accessories&hash=item4175bbe7fd Fit may be tricky, depending on the clearance between your lens and sensor.

Here you go: viewtopic.php?p=230339#p230339

Your storage is set by the bit rate setting on each camera. If it's set for 4096 kb/s, that's your data rate, and you can calculate the storage requirements based on this. For instance, the storage size required per minute is: ((bit rate in kb per second)/8)*60 = MB/minute If you use variable bit rates, it depends on how your camera processes the signal, but there's not usually a big difference that I see. Be aware of the difference between bps - bits per second (usually used for bit rate and network settings) and Bps - Bytes per second, used for data storage.

Mine needs to have the phillips screw cranked down pretty tight before all the slop in the mount is gone. The 3200C has a hex screw, which is a lot easier to tighten securely than the phillips.

Diffusers are popular in the high-power flashlight forums, where people like to take lights with a lot of throw and convert them to floods. The plus of this approach is you can test a bunch of inexpensive options until you find one that does what you need. Materials that are frequently used are pieces cut from plastic milk cartons, scotch tape, Glad Press'n Seal, photography diffuser films, frosted glass spray, or sanding the clear cover, if it has one. To avoid permanently altering your illuminator with the last few, you could put a sheet of clear plastic over it, and try frosted spray or sanding. If you google diffuser film, you'll see a large variety of them available.