Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First let me say I have a fair amount of experience using many different IP Cameras, but I am not a snobbish user. I tend to use simple, reliable IP cameras and then manage them through a good software product such as Blue Iris. I have a mishmash of IP cameras setup for my home surveillance system of varying quality. Today I saw these cameras on sale in a two-pack at a common shopper's club. When I saw the two-way audio feature listed on the box I had to try it out as this is something I was wanting. I got home and quickly hooked one of them to my network and followed the installation process. I was immediately concerned when I was forced to go through the Samsung website to setup my camera. Every other IP camera I have seen allows you to setup the camera on your home network, but this camera absolutely requires an Internet connection and that you FIRST register your camera with Samsung AND give them total access to your camera. This means that: 1. Samsung Has total access to your video streams AT ALL TIMES. 2. You cannot access your camera UNLESS you go through the Samsung website.... (Update: See note at bottom) 3. Third party Camera management software cannot access this camera in any way, shape, or form. Every other IP camera on the planet allows direct access by a web browser or camera application software. (Update: See note at bottom) 4. When setting up your camera you are divulging very sensitive data to Samsung, such as your WiFi router's password. There is no way around this. Here are some other failures of this camera. 1. The packaging claims this camera has 2-way audio. in the IP camera world this means you can listen to audio from the camera as well as communicate back to the cameras speaker from your monitoring application. This is not the case with this camera. Using the Samsung website or phone app you can hear the audio from the camera, but the 2-way feature is an intercom that only works if you use the Android Smartphone app. Again, since all traffic in these cameras MUST go through the Samsung website the 4-5 second delay I experienced just for the one-way audio was maddening. The two-way delay must be excruciatingly slow. I was unable to configure my camera for a static IP address. I tried to do it using both the Firefox plugin and the Internet Explorer plugin, both of them failed when I tried to apply the settings. I am a networking expert, so I know the settings were spot on. The YouTube configuration as described in the manual was non-existent on the Samsung website. I believe this is because YouTube may have recently turned off the ability to auto-upload videos to them. This pretty much removes the only video save feature this camera had. There is no way to capture and/or save video from the camera to your PC. On the video quality, this unit has a fair to poor quality picture. The night vision image is OK at best. With only 6 Infrared LED's, as opposed to some of my cameras which have 48 LED's, the illumination at night is very limited. The stated range of 15 feet is a stretch. My Sharx SCNC2700xx cameras produce a sharper, brighter image at 60 feet than this one does at 15 feet. The nighttime contrast is poor too. Unlike my other cameras at night, which have sharp, high contrast night time images, this camera's image appears somewhat washed out and gray rather than black and white. I am terribly disappointed. To me this camera has no redeeming quality. For some people it may prove to be useful for one reason. It is fairly simple to setup and use as long as you are willing to put up with the very restrictive access to the camera. If you don't mind Samsung having access to your private life, and if you don't mind not being able to use any of the many great camera monitoring applications out there, then it is not the worse camera you can buy. Like I said, I use a couple applications that are capable of viewing almost any IP camera on the planet. I have 5 different manufacturer's cameras on my home surveillance system and I use many different applications to view all of them in one consolidated view, but this camera is unavailable to any of them. If you buy this camera and one day the Samsung website to view them goes away then you will be left with totally useless cameras. I did not do much testing using WiFi with this camera, so I have no idea how reliable it is or what the useful range is. I will say from experience that using Wifi to control more than one or two cameras in your home network in not advisable. (see note below) BEWARE FAKE REVIEWS I went through every single 5-star review listed under this product. With only one exception, they were all written by users who have never reviewed any other products on Amazon. This is a strong indication that these reviews are completely bogus. This is becoming a huge problem on Amazon.com. I am sure if you removed these bogus reviews this product would rate in the range of two stars. Note: This is not part of the review, but I thought I would add this information based on my experiences setting up and trying many different types of home surveillance systems. A standard resolution IP camera running at 15 or 30 frames per second uses a lot of bandwidth--something WiFi does not have much of. Even when I was running only 4 cameras at 640x480 15 FPS on a 100 mbps switch I was rarely able to achieve full FPS on all cameras even though the cameras were all rated at 10/100mbps capable. It was not until I put all cameras into a gigabit (1000mbps) switch that I was able to get all frames to process through to my computer. There are very good technical reasons why this is so, but for those who don't understand how switvhes work just take my word for it, you need a gigabit Ethernet switch and a gigabit Ethernet card in your PC (which most have today) to build a reliable home surveillance network with IP cameras. Alternately, you can buy a Network Video Recorder with built in ports for each camera. For me, the best setup is a piece of software called Blue Iris ($50) and the Gigabit Ethernet switch along with a mishmash of IP cameras. THis is by far the most reliable and robust I have seen and the cost can be quite reasonable as all you need are the cameras, the $50 software and a PC. Blue Iris also has an iPhone and Android app that integrates all the cameras into one system. It works like a champ. I am running 7 cameras, 4 of them 640x480 at 15fps, one USB at 10fps, and two 1080p at 15fps, all of them wired into a Gigabit Ethernet switch. The streams are fed into my PC running Blue Iris version 3. Blue Iris is recording all the cameras 24 hours a day onto one USB 3 hard drive. The 3TB drive can hold weeks of video. Blue Iris is also creating alerts every time someone walks in front of a camera so I can have alert thumbnails which take me right to the relevant video portion I want to see. I continue to be stunned at the capabilities of the Blue Iris system. It is the best $50 I ever spent on software. While it may sound like I work for Blue Iris, I can assure you I do not. I just like it that much. For less than half the cost of a similar turnkey system from one of the big companies like Q-See and Lorex, etc. I can build a system that is better in almost every way, and you can too. Just stay away from this camera. EDITED TO ADD (ETA) June 1, 2016 Some time after I wrote this review someone discovered a most unusual method of accessing this camera from Blue Iris Security Camera software. I have not tested this myself since I have long since returned this camera, but in fairness I will post the link for those who wish to try. [...] This is an undocumented and rather odd set of instructions, but if it works it works. The partial/clipped password thing is bizarre. Credit to Wayne Bush for pointing this out. For those asking for recommendations for a camera. Among others, I am using 5 cameras made by SHARX. These cameras have been rock solid reliable, provide great images, and can be accessed in numerous ways. The SHARX cameras have a built in web interface, can be accessed by other applications such as Blue Iris, and they also have SD Card slots allowing you to record in many, many ways including using capable triggers based on zones/movement, etc. Two of these SHARX cameras reside outside and have spent two years being assaulted by sun, rain, ice, snow, and temperatures between -5°F and 110°F, and they still work great. Their cameras can be ordered in standard and wide angle lenses. I love them. My two cents. Their support team is top notch and they back their products well.