Q-See QR414 DVR Review

I think this has been reviewed before on here but I thought I would give my personal review as well. I know this DVR is sold quite often as a bundle package with some other cheap Q-see cameras and cable and such but I was able to pick this DVR by itself for a real nice price in the US. I agree with many other people that if you buy a package from Q-see or any of the other budget surveillance companies, the DVR may be decent but the cameras will be junk. This is no exception on this DVR, the DVR was not too shabby in my opinion. Please note that when I rated this, I kept in mind that this was a budget DVR and I rated it accordingly.

Overall Look and Feel of DVR unit and contents: The DVR unit itself is pretty Ghetto looking. Yeah I know this has no bearing on performance of the unit but man I wish they would have re-thought their design a little bit. The unit comes with a very easy to understand manual. The front of the manual gives numbers and emails if you need tech support which I would think be pretty helpful in a first time surveillance consumers eyes. Unit comes with a mouse, remote control, a disc which contains the media player and network viewer. even comes with a short Cat5 Cable.

Recording Quality Options Will record CIF at 120 FPS, HD1 at 60 FPS, D1 at 30 FPS. There are 3 bit rate quality options Normal, Good, and Best. It doesnt specify at what Bit Rates these are. It also has continous, scheduled, manual, and motion detection recording.

DVR GUI Very basic and fairly easy to understand. The recording searches are in 30 minute intervals but they are pretty easy to search. Everything else is pretty straightforward.

Playback Quality This is what suprised me out of this budget DVR. The first thing I did was check to see how the recorded video looked at D1 with the best quality. I have to say that it wasnt too shabby and it was actually pretty decent, probably the best that I have seen out of a low end DVR. There was a little bit of artifacts on far away objects that were not in the line of focus but nothing hideous by any means. I do have a camera setup that has alot of snow at night and the DVR really didnt do well on processing that but thats partly my fault for having that camera setup like that. CIF recording looked as it should but I never really record in CIF so I didnt analyze it too much. Also, it has 4 channel simultaneous playback which is sometimes not an option on all budget 4 channel DVR's.

Internet and Network Viewing Very basic yet easy to understand. It gives you the option to view the substream "internet" or the full bit stream "LAN". I think I have seen this similar Network GUI on another DVR. The only thing I didnt like about this is the interface did not stretch across the screen. Here is a screen shot:

Backing Up Files Kind of funky but not too bad. You have to sift through a days worth of files and save them to a flash drive. It gives you the option to save in 15,30,45, or 60 minute intervals.

Pro's

-Easy to understand

-Good explanatory manual

-Good Recording Quality

Cons

-Does not have internal cooling fan which may not be good if put in warm areas such as attics. -If put in well ventilated places, shouldnt be a problem.

Wish it had more flexible file backup, not too much of a big problem.

- Wish the web GUI was a little bigger, no biggie

- wish it had customizable bit rate.

- Will not let me adjust individual channels recording quality, if you change the recording quality, you change it for all channels.

Overall, this is a good DVR for a person on a budget and for a person who needs just basic recording capabilities. Not too shabby at all.

Does it have a full client software?

Also, most dont come with fans, but can add them easily enough if needed.

Yes extra stream and main stream, same as with the Dahua and that other DVR you tested.

I thought the CD came with a full client software but whenever I installed it, it was just the same exact remote viewing software for over the internet. There was some other program on the disc that I didnt install but I think it was a program to help view AVI videos. So no, I dont think it came with a full client software.