Spec me a CCTV System

Vimes said:
@BogEyes I know all of my Hikvision cameras (6 bought circa 2014) are still going strong, as is the NVR. Albeit they were originally Chinese hacked and bought via Aliexpress. It does seem to be a different market now that option has been somewhat eliminated. I can still see the Hikvision for sale on Amazon but elsewhere it is difficult to get pricing. I have been happy enough over the 6 years of constant and reliable use from them.
@WJA96 seems to have experience with the Dahua brand and is far more understanding with what is relevant and on the market today.

Each of the six cameras on our property has similar sized connectors you are referring to but they each terminate in a plastic type junction box next to each camera where the external grade Ethernet cable is ran to.

As WJA96 has responded you can see the post he refers to a page or two back.

I'll have to watch to see what you are selling in the MM soon @WJA96.
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Access to Hikvision cameras here in the UK hasn’t changed since you bought cameras 6 years ago and gaining access to pricing only requires you to register with the website to see such pricing. I get deliveries every week. Some online stores are even stocking Dahua cameras along with Hikvision which I also buy weekly.

Today, the average Joe bloggs has easier access to Hikvision and Dahua equipment than you did a number of years ago. If the camera you want isn’t listed on their site, a simple email and they can get it whether it’s Hik or Dahua.
 
The website I think we’re discussing (BB) requires customers to open a trade account which has different T&Cs to those of private customers. But other than that, yes, anyone can buy Dahua or Hikvision these days and it’s what I personally would consider ‘normal’ equipment.
 
Yes it was indeed BB that I was thinking of.
I just remember the days of how relatively cheap, not risk free, it was to buy from Aliexpress compared to how much they cost at the time in the UK.
Thankfully all the cameras that we bought, seven in total, and the NVR is still running great.
 
WJA96 said:
2 x Dahua IPC-HFW3549T1P-AS-PV-360 TiOC Camera - £230
2 x Dahua PFA-130E Mounting brackets - £30
1 x Dahua NVR-4104-P-4KS2-L-2T (4 camera NVR with 2Tb Seagate Skyhawk HDD) - £175 or NVR-4108HS-8P-4KS2-L-2T (8 camera NVR with 2Tb Seagate Skyhawk HDD) - £225

so £435+VAT = £522 for a four camera system to £485+VAT = £582 for a system capable of handling 8 cameras.

I'd budget another £50 for cable and connectors but if you're fitting it yourself then it would easily be doable for less than £600. And this is decent equipment that will last a long time.
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Hi - I'm looking at the exact same gear, plus I'd like to mount a camera under the awning at the front door (so can only get 8ft height) and above the garage door (10ft) - do you think the
DH-IPC-HDW3549H-AS-PV 2.8mm turret style would be well suited to these 'low' mountings? I'd really appreciate your thoughts. Hopefully BB will sell me some; I have a non-trade account and they aren't showing me prices. They don't seem to be available at any other online store. Have e-mailed them!

Thank you!
 
3.6mm is probably better, but it depends what you want to see. The recommended mounting height of these cameras is 2.5-3.5m so 8’ is fine.

The turret camera has poorer LED illumination than the bullet camera (30m Max vs. 50m) but that might not be important for you.

Send me a trust message if you have any difficulty getting a price.
 
WJA96 said:
The turret camera has poorer LED illumination than the bullet camera (30m Max vs. 50m) but that might not be important for you.QUOTE]

Great, thank you. I only want to see the 10m between my doorstep/garage door and the far side of the road so this will be fine.

Another question for anyone who has a full colour camera if I may - as I understand it, these use the visible light spectrum and not IR, and so emit a warm white light to help with this. Is that something bright enough to annoy neighbors? I know it's subjective, but are we talking more dim glow or floodlight?
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Definitely not floodlight. Less than streetlighting. It’s enough that you can just about read a newspaper. There are at least 6 users on these forums running these cameras and none of them has had an issue with neighbours. On top of that I’ve sold these into more than 60 installs since they launched in June and there was only once an issue and we changed the angle so it wasn’t illuminating a neighbour’s window.
 
@Wings. Here is my DahuaIPC-HFW3549T1-AS-PV (bullet camera) that WJA96 recommended, and with a few setting tweeks from his guidance. It's pitch black in my garden, I've turned the outside light off now and the view is the same with the cameras built in LED. I would take a more up to date screenshot buts its raining heavy here.

jo96ybeh.jpg
 
fobose said:
@Wings. Here is my DahuaIPC-HFW3549T1-AS-PV (bullet camera) that WJA96 recommended, and with a few setting tweeks from his guidance. It's pitch black in my garden, I've turned the outside light off now and the view is the same with the cameras built in LED. I would take a more up to date screenshot buts its raining heavy here.

jo96ybeh.jpg
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Thanks for posting this. Is that with SSA enabled? It’s an excellent image!
 
WJA96 said:
Thanks for posting this. Is that with SSA enabled? It’s an excellent image!
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Yup it with SSA enabled which really brought the image to life after you suggested it!

Wings said:
Thank you, that's great! What lens is that?
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It is the 3.6mm lens as WJA96 points out.

There are some more pictures of the specific camera in my install build. It's quite a big camera but doesn't look like an eye sore.

https://imgur.com/a/7ufV8WT
 
fobose said:
There are some more pictures of the specific camera in my install build. It's quite a big camera but doesn't look like an eye sore.

https://imgur.com/a/7ufV8WT
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Thank you so much, that's very useful, in combination with your thread. Also helps me in my planning for NVR/NAS. I obviously now need a NVR of some sort and had been considering NAS for a while so makes sense to combine the two in a single solution.
 
No problem, I got a lot of help in my thread so I am glad to be able to help myself. The NAS (DS1520+) has worked out well for me, I went overboard with the spec but I didn't want to under spec it and regret it in a few years time. I am currently only using it for surveillance station (4x camera's - 3x 5MP, 1x 2MP), media server, drive server and photo station. Most of the time its using <12% GPU CPU and RAM.

On another note, my street light providing my garden with some light has finally been fixed today (10+ phone calls later). I am hoping my cheaper garden camera performs better with that on but we will see. I do regret not buying a second dahua TIOC camera like my patio cam. £142.50 vs £82.50. Should have spent the bit extra there!
 
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@Wings Some more pics for you as of now. I've forced the garden camera to stay in colour mode (it auto switched to IR about 17:20). The TIOC looks so much better in quality but I am still pleased with how well the cheaper camera pics up on the dim street light.

Dahua DH-IPC-HFW3549T1-AS-PV
Mwug3CDh.jpg


Dahua IPC-HFW2531SP-S-S2-360
yY3gGTDh.jpg


My mobile phone camera (This is exactly how dark it looks outside)
OctQYLth.jpg
 
Wow. Think I'm sold on the Dahua cameras too.

The NAS looks good - how do you find it performs when accessing media and recording CCTV etc. Any network issues as a result? Are you using multiple Lan feeds to spread the load?
 
The NAS is great and doesn't have any issues with network bottleneck whilst I am just using 1 of the gigabit network ports. When I had all 4 cameras recording constantly, they were using around 5MB/s max I think so not much at all. I've currently set them all to record on motion only.

I have just put on a 1080p movie (10GB file size) to test, here are the results (I think one or two camera's were recording at the time too). Playing the movie only caused a spike up to around 5MB/s every now and then as per the graph.

YvmLYie.jpg
 
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