MR2

HAHAHA I see what you did there where was it that's legalised it?

I know at the very least in Milestone you can tune out "noise" with the Motion configuration.

I'm surprised you guys are happy with the quality, the 360's I've played with are horrid by way of quality and dealing with complex light

Buy one of these... http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=5415154#!tab=features throw a pair of 10k 300's in it for boot, then fill the rest with 1 or 2 tb disks and raid it, job done for Switch's a HP V1910-24G POE (375w) ~$1200 each if you don't need 24 port then just get packs of cheap 8 port PoE switch's (around $120 each, no fans, no management)

Question... have any of you guys had to adjust the focus of these fixed lens Hikvision Camera's?

Sounds like the UPS or DVR is not earthed?

Frankly, you want a good online UPS, we install nothing less than HP R3000 UPS's (most sites are on 5k or 7k version), they can be had fairly cheaply. not only will it make sure the power recieved by the DVR's is spot on, but if you have any other servers your protecting the UPS's can be setup to send email notifications of power issues.

Really? you can get HD-SDI converters to throw them onto his fibre backbone? how much does each of these add to the price?

sure Milestone can also automatically trigger external devices, you're an alarm sort of guy though so why not go with what you know well I say!

Love the Cat5/6/7

you'll find that it's actually very cheap should you wish to buy the Essentials version as well. I don't work for them, just like the software

I am putting in a closed loop wire into each camera cabling that will tie back to the alarm system. If the camera cables get cut the alarm system will trigger immediate burglary. Same thing on all the alarm sirens, speakers, and strobes. If any wires are cut, it triggers the alarm. I will have SMS or mobile alerting; it's built into all the devices I have. I haven't spoken to the alarm company about monitoring video alerts yet but my hope is that it is affordable so they can do all the monitoring. If I am in a meeting at work, I can't always stop and look at my phone. Or if I am flying or otherwise don't have access. For all the last three responses, I don't want hidden cameras. I want them as a deterrent. I suppose there is some advantage in hidden - you might fool a thief into not feeling the need to wear a mask so you can catch him after the fact - and I could depend on the visible alarm sirens etc for deterrence. Sounds interesting, you could do the same thing with Milestone "Send SMS on camera failure" and that way you don't need the closed loop

nup, good SLR len's can be had on ebay for a little over $200 each, so imagine how cheap a camera manufacturer could get them for in bulk some of the Fujinon len's cost more! the beautiful thing with SLR len's is there are so many of them that used they can be had for next to nix & the tooling to make them is already well established, so they are an ideal standard for the industry to move to.

my work would happily pay $400-$500 for something reasonable, lets say 12mp, with a good clear lens etc probably start using them instead of the current ones but frankly the quality increase is not there for even triple the $169 base price the 3mp come in at

yeah, that's what I want to see, without the thousands of dollars price tag.

if they really want to do something useful, start putting the higher megapixel camera's behind decent size sensors and len's (why not a SLR Lens and CMOS?) SLR Lens's are cheap as, I can't see big frame CMOS's being THAT expensive these days.

the Camera's seeing each other is a good one, where we have camera's back to back we actually have the second cam in the first unit's upper corner of the frame.. my idea for a house though is the have the camera hidden so only the lens is showing, making it require quite a bit more effort to disconnect them.. in the case of the guy above you could also have hidden cam's in the shed covering the house

you are missing a few things... depending on the construction of your shed some insulation and painting it white would do wonders to it's internal temperature, you could also build some sort of trapdoor so thief's would consider the shed empty of Electronic devices.. the device mounted under the floor would also sub the second part is the lack of an SMS notification system, you really need the system to send you an urgent alarm if certain camera's detect motion or drop off or whatever.. of course for a good system you need to have no blind spots, taking it further have good shots of choke points etc my general plan is to have all my camera's concealed and just have some of the sign's saying camera's used onsite

well, we need to talk about the structure of this... you're best option is to have an offload to an offsite location, do you have much upload bandwidth? if not then you might want to look at storing whatever in a separate shed or somewhat fireproof location if your that keen. Generally however, when thieves see CCTV camera's they pick another house, even better as others have mentioned if you have movement triggered noises in the house (motion sensor triggered snoring/laughing? ) if this still comes back to the choice between a windows PC w/recording software or qnap (with no software or the built in stuff?) I'd go a PC every time, the latest HP Servers are VERY quiet and VERY cheap, I was origionally looking at moving from a HP i7 desktop up to a rack mount Synology, then looked at the price for the HP DL380 series as well as power use and decided the Synology cannot compete.

imho, 3mp looks considerably better than 1080p yet unless you spend a large amount of money(more than $500), 5mp does not look much better than 3mp, I had hopes that the 10mp Acti would yield some gains but it was also rubbish.. maybe the $15k 16mp Avigilon, but who has a spare $15k?

the dome has a 2.8mm option, might see if we can test a few here...

those things give incredible night vision, shame they don't come with an 85 degree lens option

it's a crappy camera but good daylight image. I think if we put even more LED around the place the image would get better... but that's a chunk of wattage we're throwing into that strip...

For comparison... Cam1: low mount: http://i1056.photobucket.com/albums/t370/mgoodwinmr2/OnOpposite_zpsbc12eb4f.png high mount:http://i1056.photobucket.com/albums/t370/mgoodwinmr2/LEDLiftedfar_zps5a4da135.png Cam2: Low mount: http://i1056.photobucket.com/albums/t370/mgoodwinmr2/OnClose_zpse1b46cd4.png high mount: http://i1056.photobucket.com/albums/t370/mgoodwinmr2/LEDlifted1_zpsc7580913.png

well, some good news I had the LED's lifted up from 1m high to 3m high, there is now a reasonable spread of light in the yard, still nothing to write home about, but it's better! I think our next moves (if we bother) would be to adjust the angle they are mounted at from 45 degree down to around a 75 degree elevation (so from horizontal only 20-30 degrees down) also swap the 940nm to 850nm, yet to actually have a look at them at night but the 940's just down put out that much light.