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Note that this cam is probably a grey market Hik, based on the price. It will have hacked firmware that should run, but if you ever need to upgrade it, you'll probably run into problems. There are some pinned threads at the top of the forum about this. A western region coded cam will probably cost half again as much.

That's a good basic cam to start with, with great daytime images and decent low light images.

You'll either need a POE switch or a 12Vdc power supply, which can either be plugged into the cam directly or run over passive POE injector/extractor set. If you plan on getting more cams, the switch will make sense. Some inexpensive switches only support POE on some of the ports, like 4 POE ports on an 8 port switch. The TP-LINK TL-SF1008P is a popular starter switch with 4 POE ports.

Hik has free software for recording on a PC and viewing on a mobile device, or you can view and record manually from a web browser. Once the cam's on your network, you don't need to do anything special unless you need to forward a port for external viewing. Some NVRs take care of this for you.

NVRs are simpler and more reliable, but less flexible. PCs are more powerful and flexible, but use more power and need to be on all the time. You can download a trial version of Blue Iris or the free version of Milestone Xprotect Go to test how they work on a PC, or just use the Hik software.

I run Blue Iris, which is a very powerful and flexible app for the money. It requires a fairly powerful PC, depending on how many total MP and what frame rates you want. It supports a wide variety of cams, and I'm running a pretty big mix of brands and models.

My current system is an i5-3570 running 10 cams, 18MP total, all at 10 fps, and I've got room to add some more before I run out of CPU horsepower.

The plus of PC based is the flexibility and power. The downside is managing a PC and networking. NVRs are much simpler and more reliable, but it they don't support a feature or camera you want, or if the vendor stops updating the firmware, you're out of luck.

I'm not familiar with modern NVRs, having switched over to PCs some years ago, but when I used to run DVRs in an industrial setting, the simplicity and reliability were critical.

4mm is a good starting choice. You might want to order some and check them out before committing, in case you need wider or narrower in some locations. 2.8mm gives a nice wide view, but less detail, especially as distances increase, and 6mm gives more detail but less field of view.

Motion detection exclusion will depend on whether you use cam-based or recorder based MD. Most cams let you exclude areas from MD, but not all recorders will use the cam's MD. Best bet for that is to stick with the same brand NVR as the cams. I use a PC that does the motion detection, so others will have to give their experiences with NVRs.

Almost everything has decent remote access, and there are apps like IP Cam Viewer that are also very good performers.

Grandstream makes a reasonably priced 4 channel encoder, the GXV3504. I don't know much about it, but there are some Amazon reviews, and some on this site as well, I believe.

By the time you get enough for all your cams, you'd be better off with a hybrid. Yes, a PC-based system with that many analog inputs would be expensive.

Depends on the NVR. Some 8 channel NVRs only supply POE on 4 ports. You'll also want to verify that it supplies full power on all ports, or at least as much power as your cameras will pull. Some switches only supply half power average with all ports in use; some NVRs may do this as well.

200 feet shouldn't be a problem. The POE spec is 100 meters, which is 328 feet.

Others have reported that this model has the POE circuit in the lump on the wiring. This is apparently a trend on some camera brands.

If you can post an image of the noise, it makes it easier to see what's going on.

Parts can be hard to find. Here's a Hik wire color chart from someone on another forum:

Figured it out after tedious effort. For others who might need this.

Standard -> Hikvision

1. White/orange striped -> Orange

2. Solid orange -> Yellow

3. White/green striped -> Green

4. Solid blue -> Purple

5. White/blue striped -> Grey

6. Solid green -> Blue

7. White/brown striped -> White

8. Brown -> Brown

Yeah, for minimum trouble and interaction, it would be hard to go wrong with a dedicated NVR. If you can find one that supports your current cams, that would be ideal. Laptops and tablets are definitely more finicky. If a Hik NVR would support the Foscams, you wouldn't need much hard drive since recording isn't an issue.

POE gets pretty addictive once you start using it. Single cable, no wall warts, the POE switch or NVR can be on a UPS and keep all your cams running through power outages, etc. I have a few on separate supplies still, but have retired the big supplies I used back in the analog days.

Many IP cams have lots of low power IR LEDs like your analog cams, and some have one or a few high power LEDs. Generally, the few-high-power LED versions have more illumination, but it really depends on the design. The trend seems to be toward a few high power LEDs; they take up less space, but require better heat management.

With lots of low power LEDs, you can have some fail or reduce output and still get decent illumination, though. Many of my cams have had some LEDs fail or grow dim. None of the high power LEDs have failed yet, but I don't have that many in service so far, and none of them are very old.

A good approach for this is to use a Windows tablet, with the viewing app auto starting when the device is powered up. This is easy to do with a single cam using a browser, but is trickier with multiple cams, as you'd have to use either viewing software or set up a custom viewer for the browser that shows all the cams tiled.

Blue Iris can do this, as well; it does a lot more than you want, but is good at starting up with all the cams viewing full screen.

An iPad with something like ip cam viewer pro may also do the trick, but he'd have to start the actual app. I haven't had good luck with Android devices running for extended periods, but I may not have used the right ones.

Interestingly, that's a POE+ NVR, which makes sense because Dahua makes some cams that pull 15W, IIRC.

They're not very clear on the detailed specs (the manual may have more info), but their web site power specs say:

NVR: 60W(without HDD) (the spec sheet say 20W(without HDD)

PoE: Max.25.5W for single port

So, it can supply the POE+ spec to a single port, but doesn't specify how much total power they can supply to the POE ports, which is the important number. It's good to know if 2 POE+ cams use up your entire POE power budget.

Also, note that the web page spec doesn't match what your PS is labeled for; welcome to Dahua specs!

Hiks get noisy in low light pretty easily. A few things to check:

- See if all the IR LEDs are on at night. LED burnout is pretty common on a lot of cams, and when one goes, it usually causes more to go dark due to the design.

- See if smart IR is enabled. I never could get it to do anything, but on my Dahua, it changes the IR intensity. If it's enabled, try disabling it.

- See if the exposure limit has changed. Hiks do best at 1/30 sec or slower, but get motion blur below 1/30, so that's the sweet spot; 1/60 starts getting noisier.

- Make sure the sharpening isn't turned up. Sharpening can increase low light noise pretty dramatically. I think 50 is the default.

If you use profiles, make sure it's the night profile you're checking.

A few things to consider:

For 12Vdc, cable length becomes an issue, as the wire resistance causes a bigger power loss at 12V (due to the higher current) than at the 48V POE voltage.

Older cams may have less efficient electronics, but you'd have to test that to be sure. The cam you linked recommends a 12V, 2A (24W) supply. This doesn't mean the cam uses that much, but it may. Not many IP cams use that much.

Typical POE only supplies 12-14W, so the majority of POE cams use less than that. POE+ supplies more power, but isn't very common yet. PTZ cams are more likely to need higher power for the motors.

Most basic cams from the mainstream vendors only use 4-8W these days, even with IR on, though high power IR cams will bump up against the 12-14W limit.

For the NVR you have on order, make sure all 8 ports are POE; many only have 4 ports of POE. If they are, that would require over 110W to supply all 8 ports at full power, and the supply you mention only supplies 48W, so you've either got half-power ports with all 8 cams connected, or 4 POE ports.

IP Cam Viewer Lite or Pro will connect directly to the cams and comes in Android and iOS versions. I've had good luck with it over the last few years.

If you don't mind the Aliexpress route, lots of people, including me, have have good luck with this supplier (Julia at CCTV CAMERA CHINA):

http://www.aliexpress.com/store/638300

These grey market Chinese cams are expensive to return for warranty support, and typically have hacked firmware to give them English menus, so firmware upgrades are not recommended unless you're willing to do some research and jump through some hoops, with some risk of bricking the cam. See some of the pinned threads in this forum for examples.

I don't know any western region tagged cam suppliers except a site that can't be named here.

You may find them on Amazon, but if they're in the same price range as the Ali cams, they're almost assuredly hacked Chinese cams. Western region cams can be upgraded with firmware from the Hik site without problems.

AE price: $106

US price: $170

A few things to consider:

- Most users don't run 30 fps unless there's a specific need. 10-15 fps is pretty common. Some cams struggle to reach full rated FPS, especially if there's any on-cam processing going on, like motion detect, noise reduction, etc. This is usually due to low-power on-cam CPUs.

- Wireless is not as reliable as wired. If you want a high reliability system, you might consider switching to wired if practical.

- ONVIF is a quirky standard that's not well supported between multiple vendors and devices. Device triggered motion detect is only supported by recent versions of ONVIF, I believe.

Sorry, no clue on the Samsung NVR details.

That one also should not have bleed issues, and will have 2x the IR of a single LED version. They're actually very small but high power LEDs with a large diffuser/lens to control the beam spread. They may have different IR lenses for different focal length lenses, but I haven't verified this.

The extra IR can cause white-out problems for objects up close, unless they've improved their smart IR quite a bit.

As long as the LEDs are behind a different piece of glass or plastic than the lens (like on this and the 2332), you shouldn't get internal IR bleed. You can still get reflections, of course.

D2D saves the incoming data directly, rather than re-encoding it, so BI is unable to add any extra info like timestamps. It still decodes for motion detect.

There are 2 things to consider with D2D on BI:

- No BI or PC supplied timestamps, weather overlays, etc. Most cams can provide a timestamp, sot that's not a big deal, but I always liked putting the BI timestamp on because it let me sync all the cam times without worrying about whether each cam had an up-to-date timestamp.

- Motion detect recording starts on the i-frame, so any frames between the MD trigger (or pre-trigger) and the next i-frame are not recorded. If you have a small i-frame setting, like 10 on a 10fps setting, you'll miss 0.9 seconds max, so you'd need to take that into account for the pre-trigger frame settings. If your i-frame is at 30 for 10fps, could miss as much as 2.9 seconds.

No, they don't, according to users. I believe the V2 may have a different (cheaper) CPU, but don't quote me on that.

There are 3 main knobs to control CPU usage on BI.

Direct to Disk is critical, as Boogieman says. The other two are resolution (total MP) and frame rate. Most people don't want to drop resolution, so frame rate is the next best bet.

I recently switched my 9 cams to D2D (15MP total, 10 fps each), on an i5-3570k, and CPU dropped from 70% to 40%.

The Hikvision DS-2CD2332 turret is a decent cam with good IR performance and no halo issues. Don't know how it will compare to your LTS, though.

In general, this won't work. The adapters you show are for putting in a random DC voltage at one end and taking it out the other, and there aren't any standards for this.

POE switches negotiate with the device before they supply voltage so nothing gets burned up, and those splitters likely can't negotiate. Some switches will enable POE with a resistor across the appropriate lines.

POE may use different wire pairs, depending on the configuration - see this web page: http://pinoutsguide.com/Net/poe_pinout.shtml

There's a good chance the splitter you're looking at doesn't pass the voltage to the next connector, so if it did split it out, it might not power the camera.

Also, a POE switch puts out 48Vdc, so even if your adapter splits out the right connections, it wouldn't be the right voltage for the mic and would likely burn it out.

To run a POE camera and a mic from the same cable, you'd need a POE splitter like the TP-Link TL-POE10R, which lets you convert POE to 12V, 9V, or 5V. I don't think this passes the POE through but am not sure, so you'd need a Y splitter, with one side going to the camera and the other going to the TL-POE10R. I've never tried this, so it may not work, but this is what I'd try.

Finally, POE generally runs hotter than 12V, as the voltage needs to be stepped down from 48V, which generates more heat that going straight in at 12V.

Any C or CS mount lens should work with it; C mount requires an adapter ring. The camera supports auto-iris (electronic iris control), and has a 1/2.3" sensor, so many 1/3" lenses will work, as will 1/2" lenses. Most 1/3" lenses have a large enough image circle to cover a 1/2.3" sensor.

Dahua lists lenses for 4k cams here:

http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products_category/4k-lens-521.html

One of those is an Evetar lens. Other good brands are Fujinon, Cosmicar/Pentax, Tokina, and Computar. Don't know what their 4k offerings are, but they're going to be pricey, as SyconsciousAu said.

ETA: You'll also need to make sure it's IR compensated if you'll be using it with IR illumination.

Blue Iris is a good compromise between power, flexibility, support of many brands, and price, but it's Windows only; not sure if that lets out your Power PC. You can download a demo version to try.

It also tends to like a fairly powerful PC, depending on the resolution and frame rate you'll be recording, so that may also rule out your PPC.