Dahua IPC-HDBW4431R-ZS - Buy Log / Review

[SyconsciousAu]

So I'm in the middle of a major camera and network infrastructure upgrade. The old mix of 5Mp Dahua and 3mp Hikvision cameras has been consigned to the scrap heap.

For my new cameras I've decided to go with the IPC-HDBW4431R-ZS. One of the main reasons I chose this camera was the ability to zoom to 12mm which you just can't get in a reasonably priced fixed lens dome. I'm also hoping that I will be able to do what Nayr has done with his plate came and send instructions to the cameras at dawn / dusk to adjust for focus shift by day/night.

Here is where I got them from.

Aliexpress.com : Buy Original Dahua 4MP IPC HDBW4431R ZS replace IPC HDBW4300R Z IP 2.8mm ~12mm varifocal motorized lens camera POE IPC HDBW4431R ZS from Reliable camera stand for digital camera suppliers on E&M Tech Center Store

$89.50 each including delivery by UPS and fees for payment by Paypal.

I found their communication was excellent, as was their dispatch speed. Payment was made on 13 December with tracking numbers provided on 15 December. They arrived in Australia this morning and have cleared customs.

These cameras will form part of two builds. One for me hooked up to my existing Blue Iris Server and a second one for the Monster in law hooked up to a NVR4208-8P-4K sourced from the same supplier.

In the network department POE Power will be provided by a Ubiquiti edgeswitch 8 and 16 with other switching duties being handled by an edgeswitch 24 lite. For those who are wondering why I went with an 8 and a 16 instead of a 24 or even a 48 the simple answer is noise. The 8 and the 24 lite are passive and the 16 has quiet fans. All reports are that the 24/48 are just loud and that isn't something that I want in a cupboard that backs onto my bedroom.

Routing will be handled by an edgerouter lite with a pair of Unifi AP AC Lite handling wireless duties.

Plan is to run the cameras quarantined from the net on their own VLAN with an NTP server running on the BI server to keep the clocks correct. Got to do a bit more research into how to achieve it / if it is advisable but I want to see if I can keep the cameras quarantined but allow email reporting from the individual cameras by running a local mail server on the BI box. Also planning to set up a VPN for external access.

I've also taken the opportunity to add some active ventilation and sound damping to the cupboard, as well as creating a frankenUPS for increased battery capacity / runtime

Will keep you updated as my new toys arrive / my projects come to fruition.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

The cameras arrived on Tuesday the 20th, only a week after I ordered them. NVR didn't turn up until today but it came EMS as opposed to the cameras that came UPS.

So what' in the box?

Box itself is fairly generic with only the sticker on the back to let you know what's actually in it.

Opening it up the documentation and a mounting template sits on top.

Documentation is all in Chinese which clearly indicates the intended market for these cameras




Then there are the usual mounting plugs and screws, cat 5/6 cable ends, and an allen key to remove the dome for mounting.

And the camera itself. Body is plastic but feels solidly constructed.(correction) Having opened several up now the body is actually a lightweight cast aluminum.

Just need to find some time to do some testing.

 

[Amaresh Kulkarni]

Hi,

Did you get a chance to test these cameras? I ordered them as well from the same source and now in the process of buying an NVR and setting up. Appreciate if you have any further inputs into what your experience has been.

-AK

 

[SyconsciousAu]

So the temperature has been against me here with a number of days exceeding 38 degrees Celsius (100DegF) which just happened to coincide with my days off when i intended to pull cable. Getting into the roof on a day like that is a mugs game. I have however got some up now and have been playing with them a little.

Mounting options

The cameras are adjustable in three dimensions so you can mount them both Horizontally under eves and vertically on walls. A drawback to these cameras when mounted horizontally under an eve is that the maximum elevation limits how far you can see at maximum zoom. Mounting the cameras vertically on a wall solves this issue and even at maximum zoom you can almost look along the wall they are mounted on. I've done some testing and the edge of the image was about 200mm (8") from the wall at 6.2m (21ft).

Blue Iris

Setup was easy. The camera auto detected and you can control the zoom in the blue iris interface.

Picture Quality

Picture Quality by day is excellent. By night it suffers a little.. These are not low light cameras but they are less than half the price of the low light offerings. I have noticed they work best at night when supported with the IR of another camera, or white light, and probably external IR though I haven't tested that yet. Night image is improved where the field of view of the camera is limited. By that I mean when you are looking at a 3m x 3m porch or court yard where the walls limit your field of view the image has much less grain than if you were looking across an open paddock.

Time Issue

The daylight savings setting do not work on these cameras. I work around this by setting the time zone one hour ahead. I will have to change this manually when daylight savings finishes. It's a minor inconvenience.

Other issues

Hallway Mode.

The camera will not do hallway mode at full resolution (2592 x 1520) The highest resolution at which the camera will rotate the image 90 degrees is 2304 x 1296 (3MP)

Zoom and Focus

Not really an issue but these are set and forget cameras. You can change the zoom / field of view at any time but don't expect it to happen quickly. 4-5 seconds for the lens to shift and the auto focus to do its thing. These are not a speed dome.

I have tested the API commands that Nayr listed here and can confirm they work although they do not speed up the process.

Telnet

Despite following Nayr's very helpful thread on enabling Telnet I am yet to be able to get into the camera.

 

[Amaresh Kulkarni]

Thank you.. I was able to setup the NVR and the cameras this past weekend and it was a simple setup. Got the notifications to work and the text messaging (through a hack). Need to play with sensitivity settings as I am getting too many notifications now. I need to still understand how to use the zoom in settings. BTW, wouldn't the NTP server configuration automatically take care of the daylight savings issue?

 

[nayr]

NTP has no concept of DST or even timezones.. it works in GMT and its up to the local software to offset any timezones/dst settings.. otherwise you'd have to be carefull to use a NTP Server in your TZ

DST is broken on all China region models; they dont have DST locally so they dont really have any need test that functionality for cameras that are not supposed to be sold on international marketplaces.. it works perfectly fine on all the international models Ive encountered.

When you go to move your cameras manually for DST, be weary.. your likely to loose an hour of recorded footage once a year.. so make sure you didnt have anything turn up missing that day you go to fix it by hand.. cuz your gonna start overwriting the last hour more than likely

 

[ldasilva]

care to post daytime/nite time shots?

 

[SyconsciousAu]

When you go to move your cameras manually for DST, be weary.. your likely to loose an hour of recorded footage once a year.. so make sure you didnt have anything turn up missing that day you go to fix it by hand.. cuz your gonna start overwriting the last hour more than likely

Not an issue for me. Blue iris is looking after the recording and it doesn't take time data from the cameras.

care to post daytime/nite time shots?

Not a fan of posting images from my home on the web. I've been meaning to get one up on the test bench and take it out to do some testing but time has not been my friend of late.

 

[Amaresh Kulkarni]

@ldasilva - Here you go

 

[ldasilva]

@ldasilva - Here you go

looks good

 

[TVT73]

I am not sure but with night view, maybe I see some clouding ir effects. Did you enable blc mode or anything else? The main difference is the lens aperture of 2.0. In fact the cat is not clear visible, the slow shutter speed and or 3dnr normaly causes this. The details are much lower compared to daytime.
I also need a hdbw for my children room, but the version with audio in/out and I worry about the negative dome glass ir effects.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

So today I got the NTP server for the cameras sorted out. I cant use an internet ntp server as the cameras are all on a VLAN that has no access to the internet. As I'm running a Blue Iris box I just enabled the native NTP server in windows and pointed all the cameras to that for time. Now all of my cameras are in perfect sync.

I thought for a second I had cracked the daylight saving issue. After I enabled the NTP update the daylight saving started to work but it lost it after you logged out of the camera.

Update the original post with the hallway mode and telnet issues I've identified.

 

[nayr]

the windows ntpd is not very reliable; try this one: NetTime - Network Time Synchronization Tool

 

[SyconsciousAu]

the windows ntpd is not very reliable; try this one: NetTime - Network Time Synchronization Tool

What issues does it have? I'm not expecting atomic clock accuracy though at this stage my time sync appears spot on when compared to other devices that query different servers. Only my camera's are querying that server. As long as the time they show will be more or less accurate to within a couple of minutes, and the cameras display the same time, I will be a happy camper.

 

[nayr]

it dont sync frequently enough; dont compare multiple servers and drop ones giving bad time.. thus you can get bad time.. and if the network time is too far off from RTC time it fails and wont sync at all, so if your cmos battery is dead it wont help you get correct time on boot.

usually none of that matters much; until your machine becomes a timesource.. then the shitty windows NTP can impact all your clients (cameras)

 

[SyconsciousAu]

Thanks for the heads up. My router, a ubiquiti edgerouter lite, apparently has the ability to act as an NTP server as well, so I might investigate that. Getting windows to do it was just the easy option because whilst I have some experience with linux, and am muddling through it, using the CLI is still not natural to me and it takes me forever. Fortunately the ubiquiti community has some of the best crowd support I have ever seen.

In other news I have tested the API zoom focus commands that you listed here:

Dedicated License Plate Cam project

And they work a treat. What they don't do is make the zoom/focus process any faster. I was hoping that because the lens knew exactly where it needed to be it would just go straight there but it looks like the servos aren't that accurate and it overshoots and has to come back.

 

[TVT73]

can someone of you provide some night view examples with wide angle? I still needs to knows before order if its an ir spot or how good is the ir coverage.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

Ok so I found out the hard way that you don't push the factory reset button on these cams unless you speak Chinese. Managed to get locked out of one of the cameras when I was setting up the monster in law's system so I factory reset the camera to get the default password and got chinese as well. All seemed to work fine plugged into the MIL's NVR but now that one has gone down for reasons unknown.

 

[TVT73]

It sound like you got one for Chinese market, the seller has build his own firmware. Be aware of this shit, it can have backdoor or p2p enabled as default.
You can flash a repacked English firmware from here.

 

[beingaware]

How'd you go in the end?

Recovered with the hacked firmware?