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Max, I've been thinking, which is always a dangerous thing. Why not let something like this do the lighting and let the cameras do the camerating? I've been running a couple of these units (2 bulbs each) with two 90-watt equivelent LED bulbs in each unit, and they light up the entire driveway and my large patio and they do it for pennies. They allow you to turn them off automatically at dawn and on at dusk...and they only fire when motion is detected. Then they stay on for a user defined period of time. And the motion detection is very, very, good. I guess the downside is that the bulbs cost $40.00 EACH but they'll probably be $7.50 in a year. What do you think? Yeah, that's a better solution than IR in general, since the image quality is usually better. I've got motion detect lighting around a couple of other cams, but don't want it in the location where the Dahua is. I've got some external IR, as well, and may give that a try, or just try to scare up a replacement IR board for the Dahua.

You got the Warhol version. My 3MP bullet looks a bit like that when I switch to MJPEG, but not quite so colorful. Have you tried a factory settings reset?

Interesting. It's possible the Anykeeper lenses from that batch are mis-marked, but specs on inexpensive Chinese gear are always a roll of the dice. So, the question would be what the FOV appears to be for this lens. The specs say 85 degrees, which is typical for a 3.6mm 1/3" lens. If you went to this page and plugged in the numbers (say, width of view at 10' out), it would come back with an estimate of the focal length. http://www.pelco.com/sites/global/en/sales-and-support/downloads-and-tools/tools/lens-calc.page Kind of a pain for a $5 lens, I know, but I like to figure out discrepancies like this.

Here's a basic field of view calculator. There are lots more out there. http://www.pelco.com/sites/global/en/sales-and-support/downloads-and-tools/tools/lens-calc.page

Yeah, if these Hikvisions are any good at all, it'll be a good reason to dump the Dahua.

If this is the same firmware as their 2MP bullets, the default speed at night is pretty slow, with the low frame rate that goes along with it. The image quality is quite nice, though. I limited mine to 17ms (1/60 sec), since I was still getting motion blur at 33ms, and the night quality dropped a good bit. Always a trade-off, of course. Looking forward to more detail on this!

At least one person who flashed their Dahua to the QSee firmware was having trouble getting it to go back. Dunno where they ended up with that. If they have a JTAG or TFTP interface, that should be a way to work around the limitations, possibly bricking your cam in the process...

One common way of doing this: http:// userid:password@www.anywhere.com/the-rest-of-your-url The userid and pw will be in plaintext, of course.

If you add the -p switch to the Route Add line, it should be persistent through reboots. At least, this worked on WinXP, last few times I had to do this.

Certain Intel chips have video built into the CPU package. The current gen has both HD3000 and HD4000, depending on the processor level, and the HD4000 video performance is quite good for basic desktop tasks. On-CPU video will benefit a lot from being close-coupled to the CPU data bus. I believe the i5-3570 is the only i5 chip with HD4000 (part of what makes it the sweet spot in price/performance), while many i7s have it. You'd have to look at their matrix to know for sure. I ran some tests on an old Dell with a P4 3GHz Northwood CPU, and it choked quickly on MP cams. It was basically unusable for more than one camera.

Yes, this will mostly depend on the upload and download rates available to you, as well as any slowdowns caused by the network that the camera's on.

The same thing happened to me. If I'm remembering correctly after closing my browser and restarting my browser and logging back in I could change the fields again. I tried that, as well as power cycle, but it turned out it was a bad flash. Re-flashing brought everything back to normal, and it's a lot less glitchy now. I don't see any major differences in the new firmware, but will continue to look. When I flashed it, I had a couple of 5MP cams online for testing, and one of them was acting up, causing problems with all my network cams (I didn't notice this until later). I believe this may have corrupted the file transfer, fortunately not enough to brick the stupid thing. I reflashed with the offending cam removed and from a PC right next to my POE switch, out of excess caution, and it went fine. This is another Dahua software snafu. They should do a CRC check before flashing any code. I've had several other cameras warn me about bad firmware or incorrect versions, preventing me from bricking them. Come on, Dahua, get it together.

Whether the AMD 8 core and Intel i7 chips give as much extra as their benchmarks imply depends on whether the software can use all 8 cores or 8 threads, respectively. The AMD chips blow away the Intel chips on a synthetic benchmark/dollar basis, but if you check the real-life benchmarks, comparing things like games, office apps, video encoding, etc, there's a huge dependence on whether the software uses all the cores. Single to 4 thread tasks tend to favor Intel's more efficient architecture. The other issue some people worry about is power usage, as you mentioned, which is related to CPU usage. AMD chips typically have a higher total power design (roughly 30% higher in the current high-end chips, I think), so if the systems run at the same CPU %, the AMD chip will consume more power. If the AMD chip runs less CPU % for the same camera setup, the total system may use less power, even though the AMD chip has a higher max power usage.

There's a link to the 20120724 firmware here, both PAL and NTCS. Be sure you choose the right one! viewtopic.php?p=198994#p198994

I haven't tried the Dahua TFTP setup (don't have one of their NVRs), but it looks like the NCOM software is the TFTP client or a serial comm program, like Hyperterm, Putty, or Teraterm (Win7 dropped Hyperterm). Last time I used TFTP to update a corporate POE switch, I used tftpd32, from http://tftpd32.jounin.net/. This is both a server and client, so you only run the one program, point it to your source files, then type the tftp commands directly. I also haven't tried Solarwinds, but it may have a client incorporated as well.

The Turion Mobile RM-75 gets a Passmark benchmark of 1131. This is not very powerful by today' standards, and I'd expect it to struggle with multiple 1080p cameras, especially at high frame rates. My i3-540 benches at 2659, and handles 6 cameras, 6 MP total, 10 fps, using Blue Iris. When just viewing, it runs 60% CPU, and when 3 cams are recording at once, it jumps to 85-90%. Adding one more 1 MP cam causes it to max out and bog down during recording. My i5-3570k benches at 7127, and handles 8 cams at 10 MP without any issues and with room for one or two more, using the same settings as above. Benchmarks aren't completely reliable performance indicators, but it looks like the Turion is pretty underpowered for hi-res IP cams.

C/CS means that it's a C mount lens, and can work on a CS mount body with an adapter. C mount cams mount the lens further out (they call this the flange back length), so to get the focal point onto the sensor, you need an adapter to move it out a little for the CS body. It's a physical difference, and the lens may come with an adapter, since CS mount is what most cameras take these days. I've bought a few lenses with CS adapters already installed. http://www.vision-doctor.co.uk/optical-basics/lens-mount-and-flange-back.html This is a reasonably fast f1.4 lens, but not super fast. The smaller the number, the more light it lets in. The image will be for a 1/2" sensor, so some of that light will miss your 1/2.5' sensor, making it the equivalent of a slower lens. 1/2" sensors with fast 1/2" lenses give the best low light performance in general, as you've got a large sensor, with larger pixels, with more light hitting the sensor. These systems tend to be more expensive, though. There are some 2/3" and 1" systems out there, but these tend to be special purpose systems. Generally, a fast lens is F1.2 or below. Faster lenses can cause difficult focusing, similar to what ssmith10pn mentioned, as the depth of field gets smaller as the f-stop gets smaller. Like everything in optics, there are trade-offs. The lens is only one part of the night performance, and Dahua, in general, doesn't have great performance in terms of their sensors and processing. I don't know about this camera, but the only way to tell for sure is to give it a try. If there are demo videos posted somewhere, that will help too. I got confused over the sensor size; it's 1/2.5", or approx 0.4" diagonal. 1/3 is 0.33" diagonal, 1/3" is 0.5" diagonal, so a 1/3" lens may not work well on this cam, giving dark corners. A 1/2" lens will definitely do the trick; a 1/3" lens may or may not, and a 1/2.7" lens like this one (http://computarganz.com/file.cfm?id=620) is right on the edge. Check the PDF for this Computar lens for some illustrations of sensor size issues. Sensor and lens size descriptions are a holdover from an earlier day of glass tube encased sensors, so it's hard to say exactly what the compatibility is without knowing the actual sensor dimensions. This is complicated by the change from 4:3 sensors to 16:9 sensors, so it's a bit of a jungle out there. I don't really follow the CCD vs CMOS differences, but these are pretty well documented on the web.

CPU usage can be tricky, and totally depends on the software product. It's probably not the network data per se saturating the CPU, but the processing of the video. Software that does its own encoding to record will put a heavy load on the CPU. Other software bogs down when it renders to display, so recording will be fine, but the more cams you display, the worse the CPU load gets. Server-only systems that record and don't display are more likely to be CPU friendly, but you really have to test out different software to see what will work on your system. Regardless, 4 x 1080p cams at 30 fps will bog down many systems due to the high frame rate. What's the actual CPU model? That's an important factor.

So I tried the firmware on the ipc-hfw3200cn, and it updated / upgraded the camera without any issue. It improved the FTP behavior of the camera (one of my complaints). The camera now has HLC and WDR. I decided to roll the dice and try the firmware on one of my ipc-hfw3300cn cameras. It also updated / upgraded the camera without any issue. The FTP behavior improved here also. HLC and WDR are now also available on the ipc-hfw3300cn as well. Since it worked on the first ipc-hfw3300cn I tried it on the second and had success there also. It's too soon to know if it improves and of the exposure pumping or flickering, but I've got my fingers crossed. If nothing else, the cameras aren't doing a near DoS attack on my FTP server anymore (sending >500 commands a second to the server between the 3 camera). CPU usage of the FTP server on my PC is now between 0-5% instead of 20-30%. " title="Applause" /> I'm curious to see what firmware they send me next week that's for the ipc-hfw3300cn. I've started working on my HFW3300C/Blue Iris network dropouts again to get this cam into service, and had a breakthrough, thanks to a suggestion over at the BI forum: http://www.cam-it.org/index.php?topic=4062.msg19954#msg19954 By changing my i-frame setting from 2x the frame rate to 1x the frame rate (from 20 to 10 in my case), my BI network dropouts went from 70-140 per 24 hours to under 10 (VBR) and 3 (CBR) at 3MP, 4096 kb/s. After this, I figured I'd try the firmware update Stereodude provided - 2.103.0001.0.R, build : 2012-09-14, because why leave well enough alone? Anyway, the upgrade took, didn't brick my camera, and everything came back online with no issues, including remembering the most of the settings. The only problems: I can no longer update these pages: - Network, TCP/IP (all fields are blank, including MAC address, no updates possible on any of them) - System/General web page (Device Name is blank, used to be the SN, and the Date&Time tab won't open at all). So, the camera's working fine on the default .108 IP address, but there appears to be no way to change that in this firmware, at least on my camera. I'll test it a bit, then go back to the last version, unless someone comes up with an official HFW3300C version of the 2012-09-14 firmware.

There's a method used by Dahua distributors to recover bricked DVRs, documented here: http://www.dahuasecurity.com/download/TFTP%20upgrade%20instructor.pdf If you've got a serial port on yours and the correct files from a known good software package, this may work. Otherwise, you may want to find a helpful Dahua distributor who understands this and can give you a hand. Unfortunately, Dahua factory support for these situations is non-existent.

Yeah, Dahua is really for getting your feet wet at a low cost. If your budget supports it, there are definitely better cams out there, so it really depends on what you're willing to spend. I just discovered multiple IR LED failures on one of my Dahuas, which drops them a good bit on the quality ladder. No other reports of similar failures yet, but this cam hasn't even been in service a year yet. My other cams have been running much longer with no issues. Regardless, for a DIY system, I'd still recommend starting with a few cameras, rather than buying the whole setup at once, since you will learn a lot from the first two that will affect your choices for the rest.

All my cams run from a 24 port Dell POE switch.

Sorry, Tom's right - the spec says auto-iris. The picture is manual iris - you can see 3 manual adjustments - so that's not the actual lens they have listed. It looks like that site has their pictures crossed up, as this one is an auto-iris lens (the bump on the base is the motor), and is described as manual iris: I was on autopilot on the HFW bit, due to typing HFW3300 a lot. 1/2.8 is about the same as 1/3. You can mount a CS lens directly to the camera, but will need an adapter to mount a C lens, like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/5mm-CCTV-Camera-C-CS-C-CS-mount-Lens-Adapter-Ring-Extension-Tube-/251070787493?pt=US_Filter_Rings_Holders&hash=item3a74fc2fa5 You can't go the other way - CS mount lens on a C mount camera.

Here's a night shot from my HFW2100 with a 3.6mm lens in a pretty similar situation. It's a bit under the eaves, about 8' high. Any higher, and I'd have to tilt it down more and lose some of the street view. The rear of the Miata is about 25' away, so 80' is probably at the curb across the street. When there are people in the view there, you can see that they're people, but that's about it. I also just noticed that 12 of the 30 IR LEDs are out on this cam. This is a bad sign, usually seen on bottom-feeder cameras, often a result of overdriving the LEDs to get more output. This type of problem gets worse in the summer because of the heat, and we've just had our first few hot days. I'll pull it down and see what's up with them sometime soon, but it's not a good indication of quality.

IP cams are evolving rapidly these days, and whatever you buy will still be good in 3 years, but you'll be able to buy better for less money by then, so don't worry too much about the long-term. First question - PC or dedicated NVR? Sounds like your comfortable with PCs, and they offer the most flexibility by far, but require a POE switch or two with enough ports to support your cameras. Dedicated NVRs tend to be more stable and more user-friendly, and often have POE ports built in these days, but at the cost of flexibility and expandability. As a PC geek, I prefer PCs. There are lots of NVR software packages, and many have demo versions. So, a good starting point is to come up with a per-camera budget. Under $200 per cam? You're looking at 720p outdoor IR bullets like the Dahua HWF2100 or the Empire Security ESC-1 IP. There are others, but you'd do well to stick with something that has good community support and good reviews. Under $400 takes you up to 1080p with WDR, which is useful in tricky lighting, and expands to more mainstream cameras like ACTi, with better support than the Dahua type. Indoor is pretty flexible, though a bit tricky in terms of privacy. I only have outdoor cams and one inside my garage, though if I didn't have pets, I'd consider an indoor cam for the motion detection capability. My recommendation for starting out? Pick a couple of well-reviewed cameras in your budget range, find some software demos, and start working with them. You'll quickly learn what matters to you and what the limitations are, and decent cameras can always be resold on ebay for relatively little loss if you decide you made the wrong choice. I like the cost/quality knee, and I'd buy a couple of Dahua 2100 bullets from Empire Security to start with (or the QSee pair from Costco, which has a longer lens that some like and some don't), since they're useful in many locations. Download the Blue Iris demo (and check the community forum at cam-it.org), get a Zyxel POE switch, and install them in some key locations (like the front door and the driveway or back door), and you're ready to learn the basics. After that, you'll have a lot better idea on what to buy next. ETA: Wireless is no good for that many cams, tends to be unreliable, and you need a wire for power anyway. Much better to go POE and run a network cable. For home automation, it's way too early to worry about that. Also, a couple of ADT signs, front and back, can help a lot in keeping the low-lifes away.