Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Picture quality is great, especially snapshots. Can be used standalone/no internet. CGI API works well. You can configure both video and still images be saved on the SD card, I have it configured to save motion events as videos, and stills once a minute to the SD card 24/7. The stills are NOT frame captures of the video stream but jpg's from the raw data that do not suffer from the video compression. I do not intend to use this with any of Amcrest's online services or phone apps. I have the camera connected on an isolated DMZ with NO internet access. All attempts to connect to the internet are blocked and I connect to the cameras locally from my laptop and home server. Yes, you can provision it via the embedded web server just fine from a PC locally. Most config can be done without needing to install their browser plugin, but you do need to use their plugin to do some items such as motion ranges, privacy masks, etc... By default on power up the camera attempts to create these connections, but the camera is just fine if they are blocked. I find it ironic that their cloud service connection attempt is over HTTPS, however their "security" connection attempt is over HTTP. TCP: config.amcrestcloud.com:443 TCP: amcrestview.com:12367 TCP: dh.amcrestsecurity.com:80 UDP: p2p.amcrestview.com:8800 UDP: google-public-dns-a.google.com:53 UDP: google-public-dns-b.google.com:53 Amcrest vs Dahua: Yes, it's quite clear that Amcrest just OEM's camera hardware and firmware from Dahua. The Amcrest IP8M-2493EW appears to be a Dahua HDBW4831E (not 100% sure on that exact model number). I have nothing wrong with this business model, however I don't see much value in Amcrest investing in re-skinning all the UIs and firmware. Not intending to use any of their cloud services the only plus I see is Amcrest looks to be more consumer focused than Dahua (both in sales and support). Some faults: Whenever you login via the web interface, the camera automatically syncs the time from your PC to the camera, even if you have NTP configured, it takes whatever time you have on your PC and uses it. This cannot be disabled. If the time on your PC is slightly off the camera will step the clock and also be incorrect until the next NTP update. SMTP with the 'other' server option seems completely broken, there are some threads on amcrest forums about this. Mail test fails immediately and it doesn't even attempt to do a DNS lookup let alone a TCP SYN to the SMTP server. Amcrest's "user docs" are horrible. It seems they hired some contractor to simply take Dahua's docs and "translate" them from english to english and replacing all the company logos, providing no useful material. You can download the Dahua's user manual to get a better experience. The back of the camera has the pigtail coming out almost near the side, nowhere near the center. Mounting this camera isn't ideal. I bought one of the mounts (PFA136) which will give you space to store all those cables. Some pros: syslog works, it'll log to my home server just fine. ntp works, etc... The CGI APIs work well. Do a web search for the AMCREST_CGI_SDK_API.pdf and read through it. This is identical (or almost identical) to the Dahua CGI API doc. Some useful items from the SDK. You can obtain real-time still images from /cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi which is quite useful and better quality than stills captured from the video stream. It took me a few hours to write a shell script with wget to list contents of the SD card, and then retreive all the videos and stills on there to my home server. Relativly low power consumption, my switch reports 4W when IR off and 6W when IR is on (on about 40ft cat6). Pigtail: Oh it's almost a dealbreaker. What a horrible pigtail. People who are buying a PoE camera expect just one connection, an RJ45. This things has 5 connections, and "waterproofing" is only provided for the ethernet connection. On the inside of the camera the other end of the pigtail is broken out into 2 connectiors, a 6-wire connector with the Audio and Alarm relays, and a 9-wire connector with Ethernet, PoE, 12vDC, and the alarm ground wire. See my pictures. If you are only connecting the RJ45, you can safely unplug the alarm/audio header and even clip the 12vDC wires on the inside of the housing then chop off the unused pigtails leaving just the RJ45 external with no risk of shorts outside the camera.