Buying advice - residential property

danielnz

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Hi folks, I'm looking for advice on which cameras to get? It is for a residential property. I have a few goals:
  • Deter people from breaking in to the house or cars parked on the road
  • Record 24/7 footage in case there is an incident
  • Person detection for people coming to the house, e.g. courier, friends
  • Not appear like a fortress, or make people feel uncomfortable walking past our house
I'm more interested in good night vision capabilities than high resolution. Daytime is important as well, but night vision is more important. EmpireTech seems to be pretty well regarded, and worth going for, though I'm open to other suggestions if people feel strongly.

Here is a quick sketch of what I'm thinking of doing. The blue square is our boundary, the orange arrows are the cameras. There are a lot of trees and a pool fence along the front of the property which means if you want to see anything on the footpath or road, you pretty much need to have a camera on the boundary fenceline. On the plus side, there are streetlights on both sides of the property so there is a ton of light at night time.

Security camera ipcamtalk.png

I'm thinking of mostly getting these: EmpireTech IPC-T54IR-ZE-S3 1/1.8" CMOS 4MP IR Starlight Vari-focal Tur

Perhaps with a PTZ like this: EmpireTech PTZ5A4M-25X 1/1.8" CMOS 4MP 25x Starlight IR Network PTZ Ca for the garage pointing down the driveway (although that may be overkill?)

I'm interested in the TIOC cameras but wasn't able to tell if you could control the red and blue lights to only turn on at certain times, e.g. if someone is loitering outside our house after 10pm at night, turn the lights on.

I looked at EmpireTech IPC-Color4K-T180 4K Full-Color 1/1.8" CMOS Dual-Lens Splici, but I think the fisheye effect is probably too pronounced for being able to identify unknown people.

For the controller, I was thinking of getting a pretty standard NVR without PoE, maybe this one? I'd like to also run Frigate and Home Assistant, so I'll need to be able to access them over the network without the NVR getting involved, so using my own PoE switch seemed best for that. I'd plan to have it recording 24/7, with space for ~7-14 days of footage.

We're an all-Mac household, so ideally I'd like something which can be configured on a Mac, though I can get a Windows VM if it is just for configuration. Monitoring on the NVR needs to be Mac capable though.

Hope that's helpful, let me know if you need more info.
 

wittaj

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Those are all solid choice cameras for the varifocal and PTZ.

Keep in mind the 180 cameras cannot see infrared, so you either need enough visible light or be willing to use the built-in white lights. This is a great overview camera to see what is going on, but you really wouldn't want to use it for IDENTIFY for anything more than 20 feet away.

The TIOC can certainly be set up to only audio and visual alarm during certain hours. I have one but I will warn you that the red/blue flashing lights are more gimmicky and are certainly not a deterrent. With any ambient light you won't see the red/blue flashing unless you are looking right at the camera.

And the two-way talk is gimmicky also and is more like walkie-talkie and a several second lag. Real hard to have a conversation with them, but good for yelling "get the f off my lawn" LOL.

If you want active deterrence, your best bet is to go with the 2MP IPC-T5241H-AS-PV that will blink the white light. This is on the ideal MP/sensor ratio and will perform comparably to any similar 2MP fixed lens camera by Dahua. I have two of them. I have some of the other active deterrence cams as well, and would opt for the 2MP in every instance except for indoor, one could go with the IPC-HDW3449HP-AS-PV that has the red/blue lights that will bounce off the walls and be much more impressive than outside.


Further, most here find that cameras and motion activated lights ends up causing problems with image exposure and are bad for surveillance cameras.. What happens is then the camera is momentarily blinded and you lose the ideal capture when the lights kick on and the camera adjusts from basically no light to a lot of light.

In addition, these motion activated deterrent lights are not a deterrent. There are enough videos here showing that perps do not flinch when a floodlight turns on. They avoid homes all lit up, so go with floodlights on all night.

Watch this video someone posted and how the floodlight comes on and they don't even flinch. But then the audio comes on and they don't know which way to run LOL.

 
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Generally I’m all about recommending that particular ptz but it looks like you have several trees which may get in the way of taking full advantage of it. I’d put that money towards something that will have a chance of getting a license plate such as


Or if the distance to the plate is near enough


There’s a learning curve to LPC/LPR like everything else to do with these cameras but the end results are worth It I believe. There’s lots of information in the LPR section here
 

Ri22o

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Hi folks, I'm looking for advice on which cameras to get? It is for a residential property. I have a few goals:
  • Deter people from breaking in to the house or cars parked on the road
  • Record 24/7 footage in case there is an incident
  • Person detection for people coming to the house, e.g. courier, friends
  • Not appear like a fortress, or make people feel uncomfortable walking past our house
You can't have both.
 

wittaj

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+1 above!

But at the same time most people are oblivious and don't notice. And if they do, so what. Guess what, the few that "complain" or make a rude comment to you are the FIRST people that come to you when something happens on their property!

If the perps see the cameras, they tend to move on to an easier target.
 
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