Don Stephens

You only need Cat5e, but Cat6 would be better for future proofing as unix explained. As it's also been brought up, run solid copper or nothing at all. Buy your own cable so you don't get taken to the cleaners. Monoprice would be a good place to start shopping (www.monoprice.com). They have pretty competitive pricing and only sell solid copper.

Everyone is going to recommend Hikvision and/or Dahua in one form or another. Just start looking into those two. As far as where to buy from, everyone usually pushes Aliexpress or Amazon.

Assuming it is Longse (50/50), the only issue I ever heard of with that model was with the IR board. We have another local business who still sells them and I talk to one of their people pretty frequently. According to him, towards the end of last year, almost every single one of those that they sold had the exact same problem. After running for a couple weeks, half of the IR board would just go dead and the other half would never shut off again. It left you with a black and white camera during the day, and it just sucked at night. He had no explanation as to how it happened. There were hundreds of them that it happened to, and all at different locations. That's a pretty big quality control issue as I see it. In all fairness, it's a $20 camera. If you get it and it works, cool. If you pay for it and it breaks in a couple weeks, well that's all you can expect with a $20 security camera.

Looking at their site, it looks like a lot of Longse products, including this camera. My past experience with Longse was that they made a somewhat decent line of economy products. My current experiences with Longse is that everything they sell has a ridiculously high failure rate; these failures usually occurring within the first few months. I don't question the performance of their cameras, I just have doubts about their longevity. That camera costs me about $2.80 if I buy it from Longse. Our company gave Longse a shot several years ago and purchased about $40k worth of cameras. We ended up filing a dispute and getting our money back since everything they sent us was either the incorrect product, falsely advertised product, or just not working. If you're wondering, the cameras all ended up at a local recycling facility.

Bad sector on the HDD. It needs to be replaced.

I thought of another one: What is that camera mounted to? Is it metal? Is the camera making contact with anything metallic? Have you traced the cable to make sure it's not getting pinched anywhere?

That's (sort of) the model number for you DVR. I need the one for the cameras. The image makes it seem like he connected 720p resolution cameras to your DVR which isn't possible. Do you know which kind of cable is being used? I know you said coax, but which kind? Does it look like he stripped the cables and put the connectors on himself or does it look like they've been fused on from the factory? Are the connectors silver or are they yellow? How long have you had the cameras?

You have, at most, an analog DVR capable of recording up to 960H. Where is that 720P icon coming from on cameras 1 & 2? What is the resolution of all four of your cameras? Do you have model numbers?

What kind of cameras? What are the resolutions? Between what you just told us and the pictures that were posted, you just opened the door to a whole new level of mass confusion.

And that's when you ask for your money back or file a charge back if they refuse.

I want to know who your installer is. If he claims there's nothing wrong with the equipment, then what reason is he offering up for what's going on before he just jumps back in his truck and drives away? Why isn't he the one dealing with troubleshooting this for you? You don't really have any choice here. You either catch these people in the act and file a complaint once you've done so, or submit to the possibility that people don't hate you as much as you think. If you're willing to accept the fault is in the equipment or installation, then you're going to need to take the camera down and bench test it indoors until you can figure out what the heck is going on. You can't solve a problem without knowing what the problem is. Your installer, or whoever provided you the equipment, should be doing all of this troubleshooting for you. They shouldn't have forced you to reach out to complete strangers in order to beg for a solution to a problem that you haven't even been able to positively identify yet. You also need to spell out for us exactly what equipment you have so we can make more accurate suggestions. We still don't even know what type of system you have, let alone specs on your cameras.

I'm just going to put this out there. If someone was pointing a laser at your cameras, which would look completely different from this, you'd at least be able to go back and watch him as he sets this thing up every day. Or is that the portion of the video you think someone is deleting? The only reason I don't think it's the cable is because this is only happening between certain hours of the day. Those hours are what lead me to believe that the IR board just wasn't turning off. It could still be that but ever since I suggested it (days ago) the OP has never verified whether or not they checked for that.

My emails from the admin always end up in my inbox. I scrub my spam folder pretty regularly so I'd have noticed if they were being sent there on occasion. I don't mind not receiving the emails. I have no problem just signing in and checking the top right like a usually do. My only real issue is that new messages aren't showing up there. They're making it to my inbox, but unless I go to the inbox, I'd never know they were there at this point. If it's just me, fair enough. I'm not lazy enough to get bent out of shape by an extra step after I log in.

I received an email from the CCTV Forum admin account this morning alerting me to a new message. After logging in to the forum, it stated that I had zero new messages. After going into the inbox, I discovered that I not only had received a new message, but that I had received several from people over the last few months that I didn't get notifications about and never showed up as new messages. Has anyone else been encountering any issues like this lately? BTW, sorry to anyone who thought I was ignoring you. I just had no idea that you guys had sent me messages.

Prove it.

Did Hikvision discontinue this model?

I'm not even going to argue with your because you simply called it a camera instead of a security camera. I actually sort of agree in that aspect. But as a security/surveillance device, I can think of very few options that are worse than a Dropcam. P.S. - I can't believe we're still talking about Dropcam on this forum.

There are no images posted. Edit: Sorry, didn't see your post above.

Well I guess if the installer says it isn't his fault, it must be true... For someone so convinced that people are out to get you, you took their word for it rather well. As a side note, I would say over 80% of the people I talk to that say they're installers have no business being around security cameras...or even around electricity in some cases. BTW, how are we looking with getting those screen shots? Or would you like to continue this guessing game until the end of time...

No you can not. You need to replace the unit entirely.

You need to read this the whole way through. There were several people who stepped forward and laid everything out on the table for the OP. Choosing to completely ignore all of their advice is what got us here. By the way, this thread escalated pretty quickly...I like it.

I've never tried it personally, but all the feedback we've got from our customers attempting it says that it doesn't work across the board.

I vote Cat6. Edit: I should probably expand. Cat6 will be good for future proofing and will work for standard definition analog cameras and HD IP cameras. The only other type that doesn't cover is HD analog over coax and there's no reason to go that route unless you have existing cable in place (which you don't). Cat5e will work just as well as Cat6 and be slightly cheaper, but in the event that IP cameras ever require something more than Cat5e, you'll already be setup for it. Personally, I think it's worth spending the extra money to eliminate the risk.

I don't believe there are any Hikvision cameras that are compatible with 128GB SD cards.

Honestly, depending on what you've already been spending on encoders and decoders and how many cameras are involved, IP cameras might actually be cheaper now. Encoders and decoders seem to be disappearing slowly across the board, while IP cameras have been dropping in price pretty good in the last year.