You brought the issue to everyone's attention, and hopefully the specs on the website get corrected, or at least anyone researching the camera who is looking for long shutter times runs into this thread. Thank you for that. I think everyone here appreciates finding out about inaccuracies in the specs.
What's off-putting is the crusade and constant false advertising accusations. If you look across Dahua's website, almost all the starlight models list the slowest shutter speed as 1/3 (including the 12x zoom sibling of this camera). Even the Ultra bullet's slowest shutter is 1/3. The only exceptions I saw are some of the PTZs. Either there's a copy/paste firmware bug, or there's a copy/paste website bug, but it's pretty obvious this isn't a false advertising practice of Dahua's.
And if messing up a spec sheet is enough to boycott a brand, you're going to need to boycott pretty much everyone, because I see spec errors in every tech sector from garage startups to fortune 100 companies. I wish specs didn't have to be verified, but they do. It's an unfortunate state of the universe, people make mistakes.
Thanks for addressing the situation in an adult manner. Even though it's a critique, you explained your feelings respectfully and I can appreciate and understand where you're coming from. I wish others would have done that rather than flooding me with rude insults...but such is life on an internet message board. It really wasn't my intent to "beat a dead horse", so I do apologize if it came across that way. Part of the repetitiveness was because based on some of the replies, I felt some people were trying to help but misunderstanding the problem. Other parts of it were just blowing off steam. Perhaps inaccurate specs are more common than I realize and I've just been fortunate that this is my first experience getting burned. I'm hopeful that they'll correct the specs on the website and even more hopeful that future firmware updates will correct some things. None of the issues I've had are enough to make me want to sell the unit and I really think it's a decent cam that has a lot of potential.
Exactly what incorrect specs are there? Are you talking just shutter speed? What all is not matching up to the specs sheet on this camera?
I haven't even tested a lot of things yet..but as of right now, the parts not matching the specs:
•Shutter speed limits
•White Balance options
•Tilt range (fortunately, it's more tilt range than the specs describe, but could have just as easily been less)
There's also a few bugs that are hopefully firmware related and will be fixed, including incorrect FTP upload timing, ptz presets drifting, white balance bug (even in "auto" mode) that randomly changes everything blue when the white balance hits a certain value and a number of other, mostly minor things that have been mentioned by other posters.
Except that is not true, at least when it comes to surveillance cameras. You are a photographer using surveillance cameras to look at flowers and grass....You dont install cameras commercially. There is good reason to bash shit brands like Huisun..they produce unreliable junk cameras and sell them as surveillance cameras..glad they work to properly capture the skyline and grass for you, but the rest of us could give a rats ass if the shade of green or blue is not to perfection....what does matter to us is a shitload of huisun cameras dropping like flies.
Definitely not a photographer! I don't even own a DSLR cam! lol. I use a bridge cam to take nature shots as a hobby, but that's only a couple times a year...My business does provide IP cameras to commercial entities for security as well as IP cameras for weather and traffic (Even had government and news media clients). There's also millions of IP cameras used as weathercams by hobbyists on Weatherunderground.com worldwide. I don't think people realize just how much these are used for weather monitoring, but it's a booming industry. Also, just recently had a client that I helped set up a commercial network of weathercams at airports (using Hikvision IP Cameras and they work perfectly for the job)...We're not looking for DSLR quality or the exact shade, but something reasonably close. When a cam makes the sky looks purple, white clouds look red and green grass look dark brown, it makes it hard to use or recommend them for that specific purpose.
For those using it as a general security camera, it's great! Even gave it a 4 out of 5 rating on my review under "use as a security cam"; pretty high rating. Much higher than I rated Huisun because of their failure rates and hardware limitations. There's only 2 situations where I have concerns recommending it; As a weather cam (at least until a firmware fix can correct white balance issues) and on highly specific security projects where exact specs will be critical (because there's errors already noticed in the listed specs and possibly more that I've yet to discover)...