Decent 4K PoE Cameras

[austwhite]

I hadn't made a decision yet because I'm notoriously slow to pull the trigger and I'm also quite busy at work.
I'm probably going to go with a Dahua 5442 though.

It's difficult because I had this plan to get the Reolinks that would plug in PoE to a Reolink NVR with 24/7 recording and then maybe do event recording onto my Synology NAS (DS920+). I think having 24/7 recording of cameras will be a lot on the NAS that also hosts Plex, Sonarr, etc.
Now that I'll be going with the Dahuas, I don't know what NVR to go with. I assume the knee-jerk response here will be to go with a Blue Iris system, but then that's a whole rabbit hole to go down (what PC?, etc) and another system to have to keep up to date with.

I would love some AI recognition (person detection, etc) but when I checked the threads on that several months back, they seem to require one of various 3rd party tools that seemed to be in flux in long term compatibility.

If you want AI recognition and you use blue iris, then you may be interested in this thread :
[tool] [tutorial] Free AI Person Detection for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk

The Dahua 5442 are a nice camera. They were always outside my price range though

@sebastiantombs
What's the reason you would never waste a dime on Reolinks? For the price point, they often get good reviews for image quality.
Sure, they are not top of the range, and given how cheap they are I would not expect them to be.
I have RLC-520's running Gentle Pumpkins AI Tool and Deepstack, as per link above, and person detection is pretty close to 98% accurate in that. They are easily better in most cases than Annke C500's for picture quality in direct comparison, except colour night vision. I am not going to compare them to higher end cameras though. That wouldn't be fair given the price point. Have I just been lucky with the 4 I currently use and the 6 my partner uses at her place?
Not being nasty, genuinely curious as I have always used them with Blue Iris. I don't think I would ever use Reolinks NVR, even with there person detection options, but I would not use any companies NVR as such as none even come close to the features of BI.

 

[aristobrat]

What's the reason you would never waste a dime on Reolinks?

This topic comes up quite a bit and tends to derail threads. Might be more productive for this thread to find another thread on this topic (or another one already derailed) and continue the discussion there.

 

[wittaj]

Almost any camera can give a great still image. Where it matters is at night WITH motion. That is when you start to see the cameras separate in performance. I can make any camera look like daylight when it is midnight, but it is ghost city and blur on motion.

Are you able to get nice clean captures of people and their face in motion at night? Or has the camera internally upped the gain and iframes (that you do not have access to) and slowed the shutter to make the picture at night look good.

I encourage you to refer to this thread that many are using as the portal for discussions on the lower end cameras:

Reolink: Deconstruction of a dangerous misleading youtube review "Finding the BEST 4K Security Camera NVR Package (Reolink vs Amcrest vs Swann)"

Executive Summary: DO NOT be a sheep. Ask what a reviewer can be missing, ask if a reviewer is using hype words to sell the cheapest product. Test your cameras and kits right away. Just do a bench test. Test real world conditions. Test moving suspects. Test at night, test at day. Use a test rig...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[sebastiantombs]

What is the point of a camera that's "good at this price point" when it doesn't perform well? To me that is just wasting money. If it doesn't provide good, low light images that are blur and ghost free then it's basically useless no matter what the "price point" may be. If you're hauling cement blocks around, sure it can be done with a low "price point" pick-up truck, but a higher priced 10 wheeler will do the job properly and without all the problems of broken springs, blown shocks and burned out transmission. So the bottom line, to me, is that if you just want pretty still pictures then Reolink may be just what you need, but if you want good low light motion performance be prepared to spend a few more bucks. I'd rather spend $125 on a decent Dahua or Hikvision than waste $50 or $60 on a Reolink that doesn't perform well. Add in that Reolink does not permit full control of key video parameters and many don't allow control of internal IR, and they are total crap.

The large number of good reviews are either false, placed by people who don't know any better (newbies) or who are not fully experienced in video surveillance. It's interesting that most installers, even the crappy ones, don't use Reolink very often, if at all. There must be a reason for that, one would think, since their "price point" is so attractive.

 

[wittaj]

@sebastiantombs - you mean like this guy hauling concrete blocks LOL

A Couple Of Truck Captures

Warning, loud audio begins at the 22 second mark in this video. There are 2 truck related captures here. The first 22 seconds is a truck carrying what I believe is some type of exercise equipment. What is interesting is how the equipment is being held down. The second video is a truck hauling a...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[Royal2000H]

If you want AI recognition and you use blue iris, then you may be interested in this thread :
[tool] [tutorial] Free AI Person Detection for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk

The Dahua 5442 are a nice camera. They were always outside my price range though

@sebastiantombs
What's the reason you would never waste a dime on Reolinks? For the price point, they often get good reviews for image quality.
Sure, they are not top of the range, and given how cheap they are I would not expect them to be.
I have RLC-520's running Gentle Pumpkins AI Tool and Deepstack, as per link above, and person detection is pretty close to 98% accurate in that. They are easily better in most cases than Annke C500's for picture quality in direct comparison, except colour night vision. I am not going to compare them to higher end cameras though. That wouldn't be fair given the price point. Have I just been lucky with the 4 I currently use and the 6 my partner uses at her place?
Not being nasty, genuinely curious as I have always used them with Blue Iris. I don't think I would ever use Reolinks NVR, even with there person detection options, but I would not use any companies NVR as such as none even come close to the features of BI.

What hardware are you running your BI + AI on? Do you record 24/7 onto a HDD in that PC?

I'd need to set up a PC for BI and then also need to decide whether to store to the Synology NAS or separate. That's my last hurdle for deciding how to go about this.