Todays new toys - no it's not WALL-E.

[reverend]

For ages now I've been running some cheapo Tennis wifi cameras connected to Blue Iris as very basic home CCTV.

In all fairness they've worked well and have better night time vision than I'd expected for the price, even if I did have to tape up the IR lights as they caused too much reflection on the glass at night.

So I took a punt on some Chinese Hikvision cameras from Aliexpress. One 2.8mm and one 4mm lens (because I don't know what I want so figured you can't go wrong with two!)

The price of these was good at something like $84 each - even better when you consider they're much more than that each - in fact buying two from Aliexpress in China with delivery was about the same as buying one in the UK.

These use EXIR IR which is supposed to be good for night time use - I guess we'll see when I get chance to try these out - maybe Thursday!

 

[kamkar]

Nice 🙂 i got 1 open slot on my NVR, been thinking on filling that with a small 10X PTZ camera.
But offcourse that will not happen at the moment due to me beeing broke.

 

[reverend]

I'll get a kicking if the mrs knows I've bought these but they were a bargain - saying that by the time we actually get the new house the 4Mpixel versions will more than likely be that price (these are 3Mpixel).

We just stuck some PTZ cameras in at work - looking at them they look like quite cheap brands I've never heard of - I'll have to go and clock some tomorrow 🙂

 

[kamkar]

Aptina Inside.
The PTZ i have on my car is allso pretty cheap cant even zoom and autofocus at the same time, but it do a pretty good job i think, feel confident that who ever get close to mu car day or night i will be able to identify that person.

MY NVR cant handle those big CMOS chips, or at least not if you let all of the pixels from them on to the NVR, 1080p and thats it, but while shopping i did notise NVRs supporting 5 Mpix camera wasent that much more money.

 

[reverend]

I finally got these hooked up last night to a POE switch as a test at home.

The quality is awesome - I'm really impressed, but they do hammer CPU on my Blue Iris VM so I've had to give it 4x vCPUs and even now it's averaging around 75% CPU on my old AMD server with the two Hikvisions at full resolution. I've dropped them both down to 720p and it's averaging around 65% CPU now - I may upgrade to v4 at some point and see how that compares to v3.

I'm intrigued to see how they handle night footage this evening - the new 4Mp versions are supposed to be better at night - Dahua have some cheap options from Aliexpress too.

I bought from this seller over in China which worked out way cheaper than picking these up in the UK