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Did you unzip it first? The Dahua cams want a .bin file; not sure about the NVR.

My problem with the Hik mini-bullet is the horizontal line noise in low light at 1/30 sec; aside from that, it's quite good. I have the 2100 watching my driveway now, and it's pretty good at night for 720p, but I'm looking to bump up to 1080p up front. One post indicated the Hik mini-dome was better in low light than the Hik mini-bullet - the bullet showed the horizontal lines, while the dome looked cleaner, but it wasn't clear if the settings were the same (you'd expect them to have the same sensor and firmware). The price is right on these, as well - I can't bump up to a pair of $300 and up cameras right now. The Dahua 3200S looks like a good compromise, but I haven't test one yet. Decent low light performance and small size, and I can live with the softness problem better than noisy low light. If I could only buy a couple for a reasonable price and get some software support with them...

Yeah, this is really a specialized area, and the reason I tested it is because people always ask about it. I don't care that much about it myself, except that it's one of the useful things to provide the authorities if you had something happen. You don't really need LPR software for this, just a good image stored long enough to be useful. Most home cam owners' problem will be the choke point, I believe. If someone pulls into my driveway, I can catch the license with a dedicated inexpensive cam most of the time, but if they park at the curb, there's no way. Those of us on suburban streets don't have a good way of catching the plates on cars going up and down the street, since it's usually impractical to put a pair of cams out on the street. Then there's the problem of obscured plates, if the bad guys are thinking ahead. Still, interesting stuff to play with.

What are the issues with the Hik domes? I'm trying to pull the trigger on a couple of inexpensive 1080p cams for the front of the house, and am considering domes for appearance. These sounded OK so far, but it's hard to keep track. Too bad Dahua can't get their act together on distributors and support. It's gone from bad to worse recently. I'd be tempted by the 1080p mini bullet if I could find somewhere to buy them.

Restoring bricked cameras can be tricky. Some have readily available support, others have nothing. If there's a serial interface on the camera somewhere, often on one of the internal boards, many cameras allow TFTP access to upload the files directly, however, every camera does this differently. Tech support for the camera should be able to help with this, but often they require sending it back.

The other big driver is price, of course. A good quality 3MP IR CS mount lens can easily cost as much as a whole inexpensive IP cam like the 2100. M12 lenses are a lot cheaper to build, even using high quality components. If only they were as easy to spec.

The Dahua IPC-HFW3200S is a nice compact outdoor bullet camera for under $250, assuming you can find someone selling them in the US. It's got flaws, but the daytime image is pretty good for the money, with a bit of softness. Likewise, the Lorex (Hikvision) 1080p 2-pack is a decent camera for a decent price, if you don't mind spending under your budget. I haven't tested one, but the reviews here have been pretty good. You'll get better software and better customer support, in general, with the more expensive cameras.

OK, looks like tech support garbled it. The label probably has the correct default setting. Assuming the camera comes up with a fixed IP address, you'd need to do one camera at a time and change it to the new IP address you want to use before moving to the next camera. To change the setting on your PC, you can follow this Win7 guide (XP is pretty similar): http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/change-tcp-ip-settings You'd set it for the same IP address range as the camera, but with the last 3 numbers different (like 122).

Blue Iris will do this.

Are these using M12 lenses? If so, the answer is in the lack of standards for M12 lenses and sensor coverage. Technical lecture coming up... Back in the old days (when was that, Grandpa?), everything used CS or C mount lenses, which had a standardized distance from the mount flange to the sensor (back flange length), and most sensors were standard sizes (and 4:3 aspect ratios). It was easy to calculate and predict field of view for any given combination of sensors and lens. M12 lenses are different - they don't have a back flange. What they use is the distance between the rear of the lens body (or sometimes the rear of the last lens element) to the sensor. This may be called back flange length (erroneously) sometimes, or back focal/focus length, but regardless, there are no standards. This length is different for different lenses, even those available for the same camera, or lenses with the same MM and sensor sizes. The different lengths make for a different image circle, which is the size of the spot the lens makes at the back focal length. Different lenses will give a different spot size when they're focused. Add to that the fact that sensor sizes are much more varied these days, and you end up with the situation where one 4mm lens will cover a certain sensor a certain amount and a different sensor a different amount, and 2 different 4mm lenses will cover the same sensor differently. This has some unintended consequenses that some of us have noticed, like lenses that screw in until they hit the IR filter body and still aren't focused, or lenses that screw all the way out of the threads and still aren't focused. M12 lenses are a jungle, both in quality and design. So, in order to know what your field of view will be for a given lens combination, you need to know 2 things - the sensor's actual dimensions, and the spot size of the lens, both of which aren't called out very often. Some lenses will include a back focal length spec, but that's pretty rare too, and only helps if you know the back focal length for both the original lens and the replacement lens. This is why vendors are calling out these numbers for specific combinations, and why different model cameras with seemingly similar lens and sensor sizes will give different fields of view. Replacing an M12 lens that doesn't come from the original camera's designer is a roll of the dice. You'll often get unexpected results, and unless you have all the info, it's really hard to tell what you'll get. This will not improve anytime soon, probably not ever.

Sounds like the camera defaults to 192.178.123.xxx, so they're saying to set up your PC with an address in that subnet, like their example 192.178.123.123. Whether the 178 is a typo and should be 168 is hard to say. You'd need to know what the default IP address is, but that should be in the manual. Once your PC is set for the same subnet as the camera, you should be able to connect via browser and get a command line interface or something similar. You can usually find out an unknown IP address with WireShark. If you run it on a PC that's not connected to anything else on the network, then connect the camera and power it up, you'll see the camera's IP address as it sends out network requests.

Blue Iris works well with Dahuas, and has a pretty flexible set of motion detect settings for inexpensive software. You'll still get lots of false alerts on almost any image based motion detect.

Many cameras support FTP, as well, so if your NAS supports FTP, you might could send files directly to it. For live viewing cams from an app, there are lots of them, and I like IP Cam Viewer Pro. For viewing recordings, you'll either need an app that lets you look at your NAS files, or supports the local camera recordings, which will depend on what the camera vendor provides. One option would be to remote into a PC on your network, then view the NAS files from there. Not having it recording to an NVR limits your recording view options a good bit.

The first one appears to be the Dahua IPC-HFW2100, which is a good basic 720p camera. The second one appears to be the Dahua IPC-HFW3200S, which is their compact, fewer frills version of the IPC-HFW3200C. Also a good basic camera. Search the forum for variations on these model names, and you'll find a ton of posts. Both have drawbacks, but have good performance for the money. The main thing to check is how the support works, as Dahua provides no factory support to end users at all. Ask them how you'll be getting firmware updates - some will send it to you, others make you send the camera back to them, which is pretty unacceptable. In any case, you're stuck with what your supplier provides as service (and the forums, of course).

IP Cam Viewer Pro is a great app for iPhone and Android. I don't know if it supports Axis, but I'd be surprised if it didn't.

Someone mentioned that their new cameras came with 5.0.0 installed. The European site didn't have this version available last time I checked.

Subtype=0 should get you the full resolution the camera's set for, assuming this works with Vitamin D.

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.

Is this real motion, or is it from video noise? The Dahuas can have a lot of sharpening noise in low light, and I have one that gives a lot of motion alerts at dusk due to this. If this is the problem, it's a hard thing to fix. You can reduce sharpening, but the Dahua already suffers from softness in certain situations. I'd recommend playing with the settings to see what combination of them minimizes the alerts. Unfortunately, most of these settings can't be scheduled, so whatever helps your night situation may hurt your day situation. Blue Iris has a nice feature to help with this - you can turn on a mode that shows blue blocks where it detects motion, and it makes it very easy to test different camera settings and sensitivity settings. I don't think the Aver software does this, but I'm a version or two behind.

Those circles around the edges look a lot like the rings around the lens reflecting ir back onto the inside of the dome.

I was going to install it on mine, before I realized it was for PAL. Dunno if it would have bricked the camera, as PAL and NTSC really shouldn't have any effect on IP cams except for frame rate. I found the same file in 2 different places on European websites, without the goofy readme.txt, and with a slightly different name - General_IPC-HX3(2)XXX_Eng_P_V2.210.0000.0.R.20130313 (missing the SDXXXX in the name) - and they both compare exactly to that file when extracted to the .bin. So, if it's not legit, it's part of a grand European conspiracy to send out bogus Dahua downloads! I've sent you a pm with the other file locations. Dahua. What the heck are they thinking?

The latest version of the Dahua firmware claims to support a wider range of cams, including the 3500. You can find the PAL version by googling the firmware name, but the NTSC version is MIA: General_IPC-HX3(2)XXX&SDXXXX_Eng_P_V2.210.0000.0.R.20130313 No idea about the original source, so use caution. Here's the oh-so-useful readme file that comes with it - thanks, Dahua! What are these guys thinking?

You may be getting IR reflections from the area around the camera back to the dome, if cleaning the dome doesn't fix things up. A possibly easy way to check that is to point the camera straight up into a dark sky and see if there's IR bleed. If so, it's coming from the inside of the dome. If not, it's coming from the environment. That's assuming it's easy to pull the camera, of course.

Yes, it's a good trade-off if there's no issue with washout. Looks like they're using LEDs with lenses, instead of the traditional array of multiple bare LEDs that use the LED package dispersion pattern for controlling the light spread. That's probably the future of IR design, since it's more efficient, in that most of the IR can be kept in a patter that matches the sensor. The only problem is that changing the camera lens would require a different IR lens that matches the new field of view. I'd assume that you'd get that if you order it with a different lens, but they don't specify. There's some detail on their new IR system in this marketing presentation from their European site, and an example of their smart IR as well: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=exir+hikvision&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hikvisioneurope.com%2Fportal%2Findex.php%3Fdir%3DTEMP%2FItaly%2F%26file%3DHikvision%2520IP%2520Camera%25202013.pptx&ei=q-qwUfSHK6uGigL-mIHoDQ&usg=AFQjCNGPy_dEkLMPzS-uKcFvDBx0Q-XmAw

The hik has smart IR on the setup menu, but I haven't been able to figure out what it does. Probably should send an email to support and see what they say. This is definitely a tradeoff with the trend toward powerful IR - it reaches a lot further, but overexposes like crazy up close, and the cam's exposure control is often either too slow at responding or not good at responding to relatively small areas that are very bright. IR, like all light, drops in intensity with the square of the distance, so twice as far away gives 1/4 the illumination. This is why long distance IR is so bright up close. If I stand right in front of a cam with strong IR and fill the view, it will usually auto-adjust to a good exposure, but this can take 5-10 seconds depending on the cam, so that's not good for someone walking or running past. The other solution is to disable on-board IR and use external illumination - either IR or motion lights. Some cams (like Dahua) won't let you disable on-board IR without unplugging it, and the Hik bullets only disable it when you switch to day mode, which lets out external IR. My Vivoteks let you change day/night mode and IR on/off independently, which is nice.