Digiscan

EZVIZ does not record on dropbox or anything like that. True.

It MIGHT not be you. When I got some Hikvisions last year I spent hours confirming that their firmware literally did not work to send FTPs. It did for some people, but not for me, and that was after checking everything multiple times. An update to firmware and all was well, thus proving my conclusion, though not before wasting many hours.

Hikvision cameras support EZVIZ. By support I mean they do what you say in the brochure, but I cannot for the life of me get them to work like that. Very, very little online about it, too.

Haha. No. You can get small cameras as big as a pinhole now a days and they are cheap. Maybe in the james bond days that was too high tech to believe but now its a reality, so my questions still remains... You really can't get one that small. There are cameras called pinhole cameras, but they are massively bigger than a pinhole. Lenses, even on really tiny cams, are still small enough that if you walk around the room and look at possible areas something could be hidden you'll be able to see a lens.

Just make sure a new system is IP based and doesn't use the antiquated coaxial. Some new systems still use that, but it suffers in image quality significantly and will never grow as quickly as IP is.

This exactly, seconded! There are very few WIFI cameras out right now worth buying unless you absolutely have to have wifi. The network reliability is lower and you're more likely to have bandwidth issues. There are a lot of cheap entry wifi cams like foscam, but you don't want to fiddle with those. Take an afternoon, run the ethernet cable, plug it into a POE switch, and now you're cooking with gas. You have the best approach. Great reliability, and it lets you use the best cameras there are, plus in the future you can put a new one there easily enough.

Very cool article I just found. Short answer is 80% live to the 4 year mark. There is a spike in failures early on, but those that last tend to go for several years before then reaching increasingly high failure rates a few years in. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

IMO the simple answer is no. It appears that mechanical hard drives don't have a limited number of write operations, from what I can tell with google. If that's the case, it won't matter if you rewrite the same 200 GB all day of a 1 TB or a 4 TB drive. Even if I'm wrong and HDDs do have a maximum number of writes, it's almost certainly going to fail from a mechanical failure (spin motor or reading arm) or some other electronic failure. And I would still stand by my no answer. Just for the sake of thoroughness, although SSDs do have a finite number of writes, some recent stress tests I've read tell me that this is an academic fact only and shouldn't impact purchasing decision. The lifespan of an SSD in an even heavy use environment is almost certainly going to outlive your usefulness for it. The failure rate in general of SSDs is significantly lower than HDDs. I personally believe they are the cat's meow and everybody should have one if they can afford it. They are amazing tech and really make a computer feel massively quicker. HDDs need to die.

Awful reviews for the Mini 0806 at newegg. problem is a lot of chinese knockoffs come in looking like the real thing. Cobra Electronics is a US company and has started making dash cams and also Garmin has a couple. Neither are terribly cheap, but they are at least from companies that have been around for a while.

Good luck! That budget will sort you out pretty well with possible exception of quality pictures at 30' in the dark. I have decent lighting in front of my house and even the 4mm, which kicks butt on my driveway, isn't getting much on the street (probably around 30' also). Ideally you'd want a tighter image than 4mm gives but if you can't park in the same spot all the time that's not realistic. You'll definitely need supplementary IR to really bathe the area in light. A high power spotlight on motion detection would work well but could bother people just walking up and down the street.

$50 years ago probably makes them near worthless now, but maybe you can play around. Be warned if you do you're very likely to get bitten by the bug and start buying some modern cameras. What do the connectors on the cameras look like? If they are modern IP cameras (which they likely are not), they'll have an RJ45 jack, aka a typical network ethernet port. You're right, though, that otherwise you need no special equipment for modern IP cameras other than a switch that has POE ports (not terribly expensive) to get power to the cameras. Otherwise, software alone on the PC can interact with the cameras.

Enjoy! I suppose you had a reason why you bought 5 X POE instead of a switch with multiple POE ports.

20 FPS is very close to full motion video, which you don't even need for a security camera anyway. Even 20 FPS is more than you need. I vote for 3 MP @ 20 FPS. You'll never capture something in those extra 10 frames you couldn't have caught at 20 IMO. I record at 15 (I could go higher) for space reasons, but at 15 cars and people look fine. You can tell the frame rate is lower, yes, but it's not like they are stuttering around the picture. How much movement can a person really do in 60 ms, right?

SD card will work out great for you. Choose a lens size that gives a moderately tight field of view, e.g. the hikvision 3 MP cameras with 4 or even 6 mm lens. Depending on ambient lighting you may want a secondary IR source, but you won't know until you get the camera in place, and the built in IR on these is pretty decent. Buy yourself a $40 switch from Amazon that has POE ports and then run the single ethernet cable to the camera to power it. Then hook the switch up to your router and now it's fully network enabled. Given what you said you want you don't need to bother with any other storage. As long as you trust the camera won't be stolen, the SD should work out great.

Everything I've read says go with IP on a new install (i.e. running wires). It is certainly the future, so you might as well hop on the bandwagon.

If a building is broken into it could plausibly be accessed unless hidden. I'd go for a closet or something else nondescript. It's actually quite easy to hide things if you think a little while on it, and it's not like you need to protect against an invasive search warrant; just some people in there for a typically short period of time.

I use the taotronics one on amazon. It retails at $127 but I got it on sale at about $91. Have used it for a few months happily but I've not put it through a summer yet, and no way in hell I'm taking it down from the windshield, so we'll see how the heat does. In another vehicle for two years I've been using the $5 isymdvr app on my iPhone. It is a fantastic app and although it cannot run in the background (not the app's fault, but rather an iOS limitation) it is an excellent app. Although field of view is a bit tighter on the iPhone than a dedicated cam, this app blows all the entry level dash cams out of the water. Very nice user interface, fully customizable, exportable data easily accessed with gps integration and the iphone's excellent video camera.

LOL wth. That is insane behavior. I would pursue in civil court but using a BB gun to shoot at your property needs to be taken seriously.

I think he's asking specifically what can break when electronics get cold? I googled his question briefly. Something with moving parts can suffer cold damage, e.g. if bearing lubricants lose fluidity. Most of the junk I find on google pertains to products with batteries, which is of no relevance to this matter. Certainly many people have run cameras well below the stated minimum spec (I had one rated to 32 F minimum and it had no problems in single digit F), but yeah, what exactly happens to damage a camera when temps are, say, -30 F? What component actually dies? Do Capacitors care? Do CPUs (pretty sure no on that one!)? Do image sensors?

That got very strange. Are you setting up a system for your own security or to spy on neighbors? Strange wording.

Sincerely we don't want to waste more time from customer and ours.Cantonk agreed to offer free one camera for Mr Simon which he asked. Quote from Mr Simon email asking more and more free cameras. We try our best to provide the best solution for Mr Simon,but regarding not agree to offer this unfair requirement,he won't remove this article,we can't accept again.It will be unending requirement.Thanks. Best Regards Wow, that is extortion. Absolutely despicable behavior demanding this kind of thing in return for removing information on something. Either the information is true or it isn't, irrespective of whether a manufacturer sends back more product.

Have you thought about moving #2 to the left where the house and left side of patio intersect? it seems like if it's on that corner it could get the deck/patio and still the part of the stairs a person walks up. Otherwise, it's a good spot and perfect on the stairs. I think your driveway cam couldn't be better. 1 & 3 are going to overlap, but it probably can't be helped. You would have to turn 3 pointing the other way, and then it won't get the walkway I assume you have between the front of the house and the garage, plus you lose part of the driveway. My two front cams also significantly intersect and there was just no way around it without placing one camera in a spot that looked awful (although functionally superior).

Damn, you can make out some pretty good detail on the plates on the cars across the street. Maybe twice the resolution at the most and you could see them with some cleaning up. Have your neighbors ever expressed interest in your cams? Some might think it creepy but on the other hand some might be quite appreciative of having a high end system covering the front of their houses for no cost at all. ------ Whether that camera costs $200, $1200, or $19.99 to make is kind of immaterial. If you want that level of clarity you pay the money, otherwise wait until somebody else can do it. Such is always the way with tech! When you're the only person making it, you charge what you want and people buy it or they don't.

Consumers who don't know any better are easily swayed by megapixel numbers, so that's why smart phones keep advertising them as higher and higher. You see the same in consumer grade cameras. You can buy a 14 mp point and shoot camera for under a hundred bucks but a DSLR camera that cost several times that and takes pics at half the resolution will smoke it. All megapixel tells you is the amount of pixels in the picture, not their quality. You could find a 1024X768 image taken from a $1500 DSLR camera--that's not even one 1 MP in size, and never get an image that good with a cheap point and shoot. It might have more detail if you digitally zoom, but it looks worse. Beyond megapixel you've got all the other work the camera does with lighting. Smartphones do have amazing cameras in them for the size and price, though.

You can expose remote access in a number of ways: 1) Web access to the camera or DVR's admin screens 2) Thick app (e.g. downloaded to android or iOS) that logs into the camera 3) One of the free IP Camera products (I know there is a decent one for IOS). In all cases these are passworded. The easiest thing for you to do is give tenants read-only (no historical data access) to the cameras and then change the password every once in a while. The obvious risk, and it's a significant one, is that they will share it with family, and start leaving windows up at work and what not. It could be very burdensome on your network. Thus, a simpler approach and one that locks down things much tighter is to have a simple web page that takes a picture every few seconds and uploads it. Even that uploading will take up a few mbps as you get several cameras and keep the intervals fairly tight, but this way you don't get people trying to pull multiple HD streams remotely. You'd keep all the full footage at high FPS and historical data on your end, and rely on the tenants as just watch dogs. I suppose you've contacted the tenants to see if they are okay with other tenants having access to this. It's all public of course and ultimately they cannot say no, but it might be a good idea to ask anyway