$99 Amcrest 1080p ProHD from Foscam

it's alive. 4 screws under each of the rubber feet, and one small black screw holding the circuit board on. I used some glass cleaner to wipe things down and a hair dryer to finish drying things. I plugged it back in, got a power light this time, nothing else Unplugged it and waited an hour, and it's working again. Thanks for the tip!
 
Great!! Glad to hear that typo. Glad the circuit board cleaning did the job. :-)
 
Mr-Gizmo said:
I was able to fix the 5-7 second video freezing problem that was occurring in Blue Iris by changing the Amcrest camera model from "ProHD 1080P TSP/HTTP" to "IP2M-841W Main Stream RTSP" and by unselecting "Use RTSP/stream timecode".
Click to expand...


Thanks for the TIP! going to test this out. The microfreezes on the playback was driving me nuts!
 
Glad I found this forum... I recently purchased the Amcrest ProHD for ~ $99 off Amazon. I bought it as a test to see if it would be suitable as a replacement for my almost 5 year old Foscam FI8918W cameras that are still going strong and surviving the outdoors under a carport since 2011, but video quality is so yesteryear on them.

The good: The Amcrest's video quality is fantastic for a $100 camera. tilt and pan motion is fast and smooth.
The bad: The motion detection sucks. Really badly. It is unreliable and either way too sensitive or not sensitive enough to be usable. I exhausted all combinations of settings and could not find a happy place where it was reliable and just sensitive enough to trigger if something like a bobcat or coyote was walking under my carport. It would either pick up every moving leaf shadow yet not detect a car, or it would take something big as a car to set it off. Also, it would only send one single snapshot with each motion-detect email and that snapshot would be several seconds behind the motion event so that the object that triggered it was no longer in view. Useless. They have no clue about writing firmware/software for what could be amazing hardware for the price.

So, I then bought a Foscam FI9821P since my old Foscams had such good motion detection and sent me 6 snapshots of the motion in each email. Well, the image quality of course does not compare to the Amcrest since it's not only 720p vs 1080p but the sensor in the Foscam just is not as good. That's OK since 720 blows away my old cameras. The motion detect is good and reliable too, but it only sends 3 snapshots per email, when Foscam's sales rep told me via web chat that it would send 6.
The really bad: This camera requires you to install a buggy, half-baked browser plugin that only works with IE and ignores the browser's proxy setings. That means I cannot even access my camera from the office since all web traffic there goes thu a proxy for security. My old Foscam cameras worked perfectly fine on IE, Firefox, Chrome browsers and also on Windows, Linux, Mac and Chromebook computers too and went thru the security proxy just fine.

I can access this camera thru the IP Cam Viewer android app on my phone using our Wifi network at my office but video is extremely choppy and herky-jerky and drops out for several seconds at a time. My old Foscam units are smooth as silk in this very same app in comparison. I've even got both main and sub streams tuned down to low res and slow framerates on the FI9821P to use minimum bandwidth, but that did not help much.

I'm now so disappointed in Foscam that I must find a new brand of camera and do not recommend them to anyone anymore. Stay away from them. Their software has become useless rubbish.
 
We have approximately 12 of the 3mg pProHD and they are working very well and only minor problems. The motion detector is setup through BI and it works well. I have it sending texts to 3-4 employees when a truck makes a delivery and sets the motion off for 3 seconds. We do have 3 on the outside of our building and so far they have weathered all of our storms (1-2), hopefully this doesn't become a problem. The digital zoom is ok nothing fantastic but for our needs it seems to be working. fine.

if you want to view the cameras in the office on your computers there use
[h=3]AMCREST SURVEILLANCE PRO FOR HDCVI 720P/1080P DVRS[/h]The below link will open up a download for the .exe (or executable program) that will allow you to install the Amcrest Surveillance Pro client for Windows computers. Please note that you need to double-click the file that you download to your computer to "run" the installer. After it is finished installing, there should be a shortcut on your desktop to launch Amcrest Surveillance Pro.
Compatibility: Requires Windows 7 or later.
Please click the link below to begin the download.
Amcrest Surveillance Pro Download Link - Windows Client (EXE)



This works great and gets around the stupididty of the IE vs Chrome problems. It had an advantage of using very little of the CPU as well compared to BI.

I do think I might look for some optical zoom cameras to replace some of these as time requires. If in fact they do get destroyed by the conditions outdoors that may be an additional requirement.
 
Yep! I will second this. I had a Amcrest fail after 1 day of use, POE power circuit failed after one day. Junk, Junk, Junk !
 
If Amcrest is crap, is there any recommendations for a decent indoor PT camera with a mic? I already have a couple of Hik 2432's but was wondering if there's anything comparable that includes pan/tilt. Almost ordered a Amcrest HD but after reading some negative posts about this camera, might look for something else.
 
Im a newer POE cam user, I wish i had an answer for you. But after my last year of hair pulling and keeping Canada Post in business by sending this garbage Foscam cameras back, I would say try anything else.
 
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Thanks, I'll look into the DS-2CD2F42FWD-IWS. I noticed they're available on Ali for around $150 with free shipping.
 
Mr-Gizmo said:
I was able to fix the 5-7 second video freezing problem that was occurring in Blue Iris by changing the Amcrest camera model from "ProHD 1080P TSP/HTTP" to "IP2M-841W Main Stream RTSP" and by unselecting "Use RTSP/stream timecode".
Click to expand...

This worked for my 4 ProHD cam's. Thank you Mr-Gizmo!
 
typo said:
one thing about the Amcrest ProHD - it's not weatherproof. Of course, it's not advertised as such! I have one in my entryway, which is well protected from the weather. The other one under an eave in my backyard. I was hoping it would be protected enough from the weather to survive, but we had one heck of a storm last night and rain was going sideways. Anyway, that camera is now dead. I knew this was a possibility, and even thought of building a shield of some sort, but didn't get around to it.
Click to expand...

i have a few of these also mounted outside and also worry about when it rains, strong winds might make the rain blow sideways. Will have to observe.
 
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