Have a look at the equipment installed by
@Avalon above - the lower cost HiView system he initially looked at would be fine for your requirements or the more expensive HikVision parts would be pretty much everything you could ever want. It’s pretty much state of the art in the low cost/professional marketplace. HiView is Hikvision’s prosumer gear so it’s pretty decent but if you want something you can really rely on, I would go with the HikVision setup. £500-ish in parts and if you can do the labour yourself then maybe £100 in cable and fittings.
@WJA96
Thank you so much for the reply. I appreciate your helpful advice.
Realising that it wasn’t quite fair of me to jump in at the end of the thread asking questions, I’ve now read back to page 100!!
I thought when I started my search for a very basic, simple, 2/3 camera set up, that my main concern was relating to which cameras/systems offered me the facility of privacy masking/filters due to the location of an area behind my house which I 100% do not want to cover.
However, having now read so many of your previous posts, I’ve come across something else which I have to get clear in my head before moving forward.
It concerns security and in particular, your posts 2779 and 2781. You mentioned that P2P is in use by most of the major brands for phone/tablet access to the cameras and ‘is inherently insecure’. You went on to say that the only secure way of connecting to a camera is by a VPN. And it is at this point that my reasonable IT knowledge/skills come crashing down around me because even though I know what a VPN is and does (and have trialled one provided by my IS security software provider) if it came to setting one up for real and understanding how the VPN works when connecting from outside the LAN, quite frankly I’d be lost.
So what I need to try to get clear in my head is;
1 If I were to buy a couple of cameras and an NVR (assuming I use the standard software), will this open port 37777 by default (i.e. by connecting the NVR to my router) or does the whole issue surrounding a P2P connection only become an issue if i attempt to access stored/live footage remotely (i.e. outside of my LAN)?
2 If I wasn’t bothered about accessing remotely (I realise that this limits the usefulness of a system somewhat), is it theoretically possible to set up the cameras and NVR with no connection to the router, thereby removing any P2P connection issues?
3 Whether I’m one of those with ‘too much but still not enough knowledge’ and would be better off with a professional installer?
If you have time to reply, then that would be great. If not, then I quite understand.
Thank you.