Just to add some clarity based on personal experience. In the past OEM vs Original had actual meaning in the industry.
The meaning and use of the phrase OEM was intended for third parties to hire companies like Hikvision to make or rebrand their hardware for personal use and sell under their own private label. Often times third party companies would add / remove features to meet cost or take market share.
The phrase
Original with respect to Hikvision indicates this hardware is not region locked and can be updated should it be required.
Grey market simply indicates the hardware was not purchased via an authorized channel(s) and cutting out the multitude of middlemen in between.
Unlike the millions of other companies around the world Duhua / Hikvision doesn’t care or enforce who they sell to! Their only motivation is profit and market share.
Going on a tangent:
You’ll never see any (fortune 100) company selling direct to the consumer such as Intel, Nike, insert any real company directly to the consumer - ever.
Keeping in mind we are not taking about hardware that fell off a truck or was a one off / once in a lifetime steal!
Like you see all over Amazon, AliExpress, eBay, etc.
Regardless, both of these companies offer some the worst technical support for their hardware when compared to other major 1st tier manufacturer!
Duhua could literally be the undefeated king in IP cameras bar none. As they innovate and keep pushing the security industry while maintaining unbelievable final costs to the consumer.
Yet every year some how they push out firmware that breaks existing (fully operational) hardware in the field?!?
You have hundreds of engineers in house and access to every known (produced) camera. Yet don’t test to make sure the next release actually works before publishing the same???
You have to be retarded and thick in the head to do so! Yet it seems every year this company does so for some unknown reason???
Instead of actually testing or god forbid have a real beta group be provided hardware to test in controlled environment but we’ll just let the enthusiast (like here) find out for them???
Hikvision from experience is less of a shit show and seems to go through industry best practices given their market share and high profile installations.
The bottom line with respect to Duhua’s shitty firmware is poor management which doesn’t enforce process & procedures.
In closing, given the millions of cameras sold per year both companies have what appears to be very low hardware failures not withstanding firmware induced ones!
The above view is based on public reporting and channel feedback.
