Unless your house has awesome outside lighting at night, you’re almost guaranteed to run into the issue where image quality at night gets noisy/grainy unless you get a camera that uses Sony’s STARVIS image sensor in it. At 2/3 MP, the physical size on the image sensor for each pixel is larger and captures more light, which makes dusk/night image quality a ton better.
Dahua cameras with this setup are called Starlight and come in all shapes (turrets are preferred outside as they don’t have domes on them that can reflect the IR). Hikvision cameras like this are called Ultra Low Light.
Ubnt doesn’t have any cameras like that. There is a thread on here about them, with a Ubnt employee that participated for awhile. IIRC, he said their value-add is easy warranty service and no fuss firmware upgrades. Their image quality appears to be run-of-the-mill, definitely not on par with the Dahua and Hikvision with the Sony STARVIS sensors, at least not after dusk. And they don’t support ONVIF, which makes them that more of a PITA to use with other recorders, like
Blue Iris. I think they make more sense as indoor cameras for businesses that are paying another company to install something for them.
I run a USG-3, their 8-port PoE switch, and an AC Pro (with a CloudKey managing it all). Love the UBNT hardware, features, and management. It was a tough call not to go with their camera system, but after almost a year running Dahua Starlights with Blue Iris, I have no regrets and would do the same build if starting today.
The “go to” camera here for the last year has been the Dahua Starlight turret. There is an Ali vendor (Andy,
@EMPIRETECANDY) that sells Dahua that has been very active on the forums for both pre-sale questions and post-sale support, so it’s not like ordering from a random Ali store in China where you hope you’re not getting scammed (or will still be there if you have problems later). He will also do sales via PayPal (vs his Ali store) if you contact him through email. At this point, with the big install base of these Dahua Starlights, the forum itself has become a great source of knowledge and support. While there is no direct-to-Dahua support for these cameras, Andy has opened support cases for us and Dahua has made firmware updates based on them.
I’m a Mac guy but run a headless Windows box for Blue Iris. I run the iOS client on both my iPhone and iPad, and it even pushes motion alerts to my watch (including an image snapshot). I didn’t care for the look/feel of the native WebUI, but an admin here wrote a much better looking one that can be dropped in. I think the BI author is going to be including that version as the native in a future update. BI also gets small updates at least once a month, which has been cool.
I did not want a PC running 24x7, so I started with a Dahua NVR before Blue Iris. It was OK, but at the time there was a (since fixed) firmware bug that caused some dropped frames when motion recordings stopped. I switched to BI very begrudgingly and have come to love it. The BI mobile app is soooooo much faster to connect, and the way it organizes the clips of motion make it so much easier to remotely see what’s going on. Alerts are more customizable (so I’m not getting 20 back to back when my roommate is outside playing fetch with his dogs, and it’s super easy for me to mute them entirely for an hour when I’m mowing the lawn). BI can easily make http calls when alerts happen, which easily ties it into my separate home automation system.
Oh, before the Dahua NVR I ran Surveillance Station on an old Synology NAS. It worked, it was just slow with only two cameras (could have been my old hardware), and the remote app was clunky. Not many folks here were using it, and the Synology forums weren’t very active with it, so I didn’t feel that great about purchasing additional licenses for it.
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