Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I plan on purchasing a few of these to replace my 600TVL outdoor analog cameras, so I purchased one and did a teardown to gauge the quality of these since they are 2-3x the cost of my analog cameras when I purchased them years ago. I'm an electrical engineer with 10yrs of experience designing electronics for rugged industrial environments. In opening this up I realize I have voided my warranty and if you decide to do the same you should also consider your warranty voided. Here are my initial impressions: - Included in the box is a short ethernet cable (which is really only good for testing), a DC power adapter if you don't use PoE, some hardware to make the ethernet connection waterproof, a hex key for adjusting the camera mount, and screws for wall mounting. There is nothing to make the 12V power connection waterproof though, so plan on using PoE or make sure you have some way to protect this connection if your connections are outside. Also annoying if you use PoE is the extra connectors hanging out. I wish these were removable or not even present. - Camera is built in a rugged assembly. - There are three screws holding the case together. The screw material is very soft and the screws strip easily. - Inside is a number of PCB assemblies and a dessicant pack (to keep the inside moisture level low). There is some adhesive to hold part of the assembly to the back of the camera case, as well as two screws. - The camera module is held in place with some standoffs that run from the back of the camera all the way to the front PCB assembly. I would expect this to possibly be susceptible to vibration over time (if the screws start to loosen over time). There's the possibility to have up to four standoffs for this assembly, but only two are used. - The SD Card is on a small add-on PCB with SD Card holder. It's an unbranded 16GB card. It's probably possible to put a larger card in (and void your warranty), but I did not try. - The cable that runs in the back would not be easy to remove and pull through a smaller hole than what is already available with the ethernet plug. Not impossible though. All cables have connectors (nothing directly soldered to a PCB). - Lens on the camera is labelled 4.0mm, not the 3.6mm listed on the camera body. - The camera gets fairly warm due to the amount of power dissipated. The CPU has a heatsink attached, but the heatsink is right in the center of the camera body with no real way for the heat to get to the camera body (except through the air inside the camera). This is probably good for cold environments since the camera will keep itself warm and reduce internal moisture, but in hot environments it could possibly overheat more easily. - CPU is a Grain Media 8138SF-BA, which contains dedicated industry standard digital video input, H.264 and MPEG4 video encoding hardware, and ARM CPU. According to vendor specs the CPU should be running at 400MHz. RAM is SK-Hynix H5TQ2G63FFR-PBC 128Mx16 DDR. Installation: - The ethernet plug on mine was rounded instead of square, so I needed to drill a 3/4" hole instead of a 1" hole. Looks like they've improved this based on previous feedback. It's still a big hole, but it does the job. - The mounting screws included are made from soft material and strip easily. I only used one of these then ended up using some other screws I had around. Both a #1 and #2 philips screwdriver stripped them. - There is a hex key to adjust all the screws of the camera mount. It's a bit difficult to adjust in a tight space (I have one in the corner of my garage door frame and some of the screws are hard to reach). - Some of the joints are made to only mate at specific angles. This helps make a nice rigid mount when things are tight, but it also limits the angles the camera can be set at. For example one height adjustment was too high and another too low for what I wanted. I eventually got it to seat kind of mid-position and tighten it down, but there's a strong possibility it will eventually drop into one of these pre-determined positions if the screws loosen up. - PoE was easy to setup. Run one CAT5e cable, put ends on it, plug it in, good to go. No need to worry about extra power adapters, power strips, etc. Usage: - I connected the camera to a POE switch and it powered up with no problems. Boot time is probably under 30 seconds. I used Advanced IP Scanner to find the IP on my LAN and tried to connect using a browser. - Chrome and Microsoft Edge didn't work, even though it does open a page where you can download the plugin with these browsers. IE was the only browser I got the web interface to work with. The app available on the vendor website also worked and looked almost identical to the browser version. - Removed playback (from the camera's SD card) doesn't work in the browser for me. I've tried IE on multiple computers under Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. Playback does work in the standalone app though. - I have a Netgear ReadyNAS which has a IP camera application. At first I had some issues getting this to work since there's no good documentation on settings. I eventually figured out how to get it to receive the stream by using the "generic" camera model, setting the stream type to RTSP on port 554 and it is now picking up the stream reliably. TCP and UDP both seem to work. I also purchased a HDView NVR which I'm waiting to arrive and will report on how easy that is to set up. - Daytime yields up to 30fps, while nighttime will give you only about 8fps no matter what resolution you use. Also, vehicles driving by will look blurry at night. I assume the shutter speed is reduced for longer exposure times which lowers the frame rate. This isn't really mentioned in the specs anywhere though. In the end this should still meets my needs. I later found there is a way to switch between noise-cancelling and non-blurring. If you switch to non-blurring the night vision looks a lot better. - Setting up email notification for motion was a bit tricky. At first I was trying to use my personal SMTP server which works fine with other email applications, but for some reason I couldn't get it setup. I gave up and used gmail which worked after the second attempt (not sure why it didn't work the first time with the same settings). To test I have the camera pointing at a flag with a fan blowing at it. Without setting any more details it would email me about every 5-6 minutes with an image attached. - Software settings are broken up into many submenus. Some of these could probably be combined into a few larger menus. Also some of them seem to result in either the camera disconnecting or rebooting, which then causes the menu to hang. You have to get used to hitting the menu X button frequently then re-entering the menu to continue to make changes. - Recording to SD Card was automatic with motion enabled, and playback worked well with the app. - The phone app (Android) was easy to get started with. I didn't use the QR code scanner and instead just entered the static IP I had preset on the camera. I got an error the first time I tried to connect, but the second time (with the same settings) it worked. There are a couple settings allowing you to change the streaming bandwidth and which stream to use (main or sub-stream). It defaults to sub-stream which is lower bandwidth and resolution than the main stream. When trying to switch to main stream I just got an error. Sound is disabled by default, but when enabled it doesn't seem to work with the sub-stream and with the main stream is very choppy and really unusable to monitor from the app. Frame rate can be set from 4 to 15fps and bittrate from 64k to 512k on the sub-stream option. - The camera refuses to maintain the correct time when restarted. It doesn't seem to ever sync with the NTP server unless I login and manually tell it to update, even though I have it set to update every 60 minutes. It also doesn't seem to set to the right time, even though I've set the correct timezone. I hope this is fixed in newer firmware. Overall I am impressed with the video quality and assembly for less than $100. There are a few things I wish were more thought out, but in general this looks like it is good quality and will meet my needs. Time will tell how reliable it is and how well it can hold up in a hot environment.