Hello, I'm Andy from The City of Bristol in the UK and I'm looking to purchase my first IP camera. I attempted to do some research on the subject and after wading through lots of stuff on the internet I really didn't feel any better equipped to make an informed decision than when I had begun. What's more worrying is that I'd initially thought I'd just spend £50 then that got stretched to £100 then £150.... you can see where this is going. So anyway I was about to pull the trigger on a Y-Cam Cube 720 when I realised that I was still really not that sure that what I was buying was good tech and not just good marketing.
So yesterday I was continuing my search when I discovered Hikvision, which in turn lead me to all of you. After lurking for a day and skimming through the the posts I've decided to expose my ignorance and beg for your guidance in selecting my first IP camera.
I want the camera to monitor the front of my property from a basement or ground floor window simply so that I can see people calling at the front door when I'm working in my workshop at the back of the house, it can be quite noisy and I often miss deliveries. I can't really put a camera outside as the house is part of an almost 300 year old row of Bath stone terraced houses and it would look awful. So for the sake of aesthetics I'm going to have to be shooting from a far from ideal vantage point through a window with the camera at an acute angle to the glass and in the case of the basement window pointing upwards too, silhouetting any subjects coming to the front door, on the level above, against the sky. Even with a few grands worth of DSLR that's an exposure nightmare. Oh and the front of the house faces almost directly west and so the sun will be in the frame most of the afternoon. And it's got to be wireless, sorry. :hopelessness:
My wireless network consists of a 2TB Apple Time Capsule as my router situated on the top floor at the front of the house and an Airport Express on the ground floor at the back of the house extends coverage to the garden at the rear. One concern is how much of my network resources an IP camera will hog as I do a fair bit of online gaming and I'd prefer to have no cam at all rather than cripple my wireless network performance. I'm currently running just one dual band wifi network, the Apple Time Capsule has the capability to create a second "guest" wireless network too and I wondered if I should use that and create a second secure network just for the IP camera. It isn't inconceivable that I could add another IP camera in the future as I am on top of a hill in the city with a decent view, although it will require a certain amount of clinging precariously which I'm averse to at my age, still scalability is an issue. Lets say 3 cameras max, that's gonna gobble up your bandwidth I'd imagine. Would running them on a separate network ensure the performance of my main network was unaffected? Or do you think a second network is just giving the hardware even more work to do running as two routers instead of one and having to share limited resources to manage both?
If possible I'd like to try to find the sweet spot between resolution and network performance, initially this made me cautious of considering anything better than just VGA but I'm loathe to buy crap, I like to buy the best I can afford in the hope that I won't need to ever again or for a decade at least until the lead free solder breaks down.
I've an all singing and dancing late 2013 model 15" Retina MacBook Pro but that doesn't go down to the workshop as it can get a bit dusty down there. I'll probably only use that to review footage in the evening, during the day I usually just have my trusty old iPhone 3GS with me on a battered old Bose dock playing music or listening to the radio whilst I work. Ideally I'd like to use that to monitor the IP camera during the day, it only works on 2.4GHz and has a screen resolution of 480x320.... Suppose I could get a used iPad or take the hit on a 5s but I'm more inclined to keep going with what I have, if at all possible.
Then there's the choice of focal lengths, given the awful angles and locations I'm forced to use to monitor the short distance to the front door and their inherent exposure problems I was wondering if a longer focal length would produce least distortion and give me less background sky to contend with when balancing exposure. My thinking is also the longer the focal length the narrower the depth of field so I'd pick up less distortion from the window glass with a long lens than I would a wide where the field of focus is so much deeper when the subject is so close and you aren't focusing close to or at infinity. I'm inclined to use portrait orientation for the camera again so I can catch less sky and more foreground giving, I hope, the camera a better chance to get the right exposure.
Night vision, there's a streetlamp close by so there's always a fair bit of illumination but with the camera behind glass I'm not expecting great things. I may catch the occasional fox out foraging or drunk on their way home who imagines the steps to my basement lead to a urinal. The PIR obviously won't work so I'll just have to rely on motion, with traffic outside and headlights at night, we'll see, my gut tells me it's going to be just about useless, will just have to tweak it and see.
On the bay I found a Hikvision DS-2CD2432F-IW in Lithuania and a DS-2CD2412-IW in Bulgaria for essentially the same price, both are EU so I won't get hammered for tax and are substantially less than I was considering spending on the Y-cam, so I guess the question is, all things being equal, which one do you think I should get?
So yesterday I was continuing my search when I discovered Hikvision, which in turn lead me to all of you. After lurking for a day and skimming through the the posts I've decided to expose my ignorance and beg for your guidance in selecting my first IP camera.
I want the camera to monitor the front of my property from a basement or ground floor window simply so that I can see people calling at the front door when I'm working in my workshop at the back of the house, it can be quite noisy and I often miss deliveries. I can't really put a camera outside as the house is part of an almost 300 year old row of Bath stone terraced houses and it would look awful. So for the sake of aesthetics I'm going to have to be shooting from a far from ideal vantage point through a window with the camera at an acute angle to the glass and in the case of the basement window pointing upwards too, silhouetting any subjects coming to the front door, on the level above, against the sky. Even with a few grands worth of DSLR that's an exposure nightmare. Oh and the front of the house faces almost directly west and so the sun will be in the frame most of the afternoon. And it's got to be wireless, sorry. :hopelessness:
My wireless network consists of a 2TB Apple Time Capsule as my router situated on the top floor at the front of the house and an Airport Express on the ground floor at the back of the house extends coverage to the garden at the rear. One concern is how much of my network resources an IP camera will hog as I do a fair bit of online gaming and I'd prefer to have no cam at all rather than cripple my wireless network performance. I'm currently running just one dual band wifi network, the Apple Time Capsule has the capability to create a second "guest" wireless network too and I wondered if I should use that and create a second secure network just for the IP camera. It isn't inconceivable that I could add another IP camera in the future as I am on top of a hill in the city with a decent view, although it will require a certain amount of clinging precariously which I'm averse to at my age, still scalability is an issue. Lets say 3 cameras max, that's gonna gobble up your bandwidth I'd imagine. Would running them on a separate network ensure the performance of my main network was unaffected? Or do you think a second network is just giving the hardware even more work to do running as two routers instead of one and having to share limited resources to manage both?
If possible I'd like to try to find the sweet spot between resolution and network performance, initially this made me cautious of considering anything better than just VGA but I'm loathe to buy crap, I like to buy the best I can afford in the hope that I won't need to ever again or for a decade at least until the lead free solder breaks down.
I've an all singing and dancing late 2013 model 15" Retina MacBook Pro but that doesn't go down to the workshop as it can get a bit dusty down there. I'll probably only use that to review footage in the evening, during the day I usually just have my trusty old iPhone 3GS with me on a battered old Bose dock playing music or listening to the radio whilst I work. Ideally I'd like to use that to monitor the IP camera during the day, it only works on 2.4GHz and has a screen resolution of 480x320.... Suppose I could get a used iPad or take the hit on a 5s but I'm more inclined to keep going with what I have, if at all possible.
Then there's the choice of focal lengths, given the awful angles and locations I'm forced to use to monitor the short distance to the front door and their inherent exposure problems I was wondering if a longer focal length would produce least distortion and give me less background sky to contend with when balancing exposure. My thinking is also the longer the focal length the narrower the depth of field so I'd pick up less distortion from the window glass with a long lens than I would a wide where the field of focus is so much deeper when the subject is so close and you aren't focusing close to or at infinity. I'm inclined to use portrait orientation for the camera again so I can catch less sky and more foreground giving, I hope, the camera a better chance to get the right exposure.
Night vision, there's a streetlamp close by so there's always a fair bit of illumination but with the camera behind glass I'm not expecting great things. I may catch the occasional fox out foraging or drunk on their way home who imagines the steps to my basement lead to a urinal. The PIR obviously won't work so I'll just have to rely on motion, with traffic outside and headlights at night, we'll see, my gut tells me it's going to be just about useless, will just have to tweak it and see.
On the bay I found a Hikvision DS-2CD2432F-IW in Lithuania and a DS-2CD2412-IW in Bulgaria for essentially the same price, both are EU so I won't get hammered for tax and are substantially less than I was considering spending on the Y-cam, so I guess the question is, all things being equal, which one do you think I should get?
It's 64GB so even if I do get allot of false positives it should still hold a couple of days worth of clips... or so I'm hoping.