so, after a full day with my new toy, the good news is i have not decided to return it yet, but there's plenty of "bad" news;
bad: submitting your email for firmware updates is merely an excuse for amcrest to spam you, not only are they 4mo behind
but you can't unsubscribe from the spam without missing out on any future firmware update notifications.
bad; as i posted earlier, h.265 is a joke on this ip cam - too much ghosting and frame skipping, so you'll have to use h.264.h
in fairness, i don't have an nvr, maybe the h.265 only works when the poe is directly plugged into it, instead of a gig switch.
bad; clients get 30 minutes timed out so you must login again after prolonged live view sessions. what's really stupid
about this is - the live view itself continues, it's access to setup changes that gets timed out and will require a fresh login.
this bug would actually be a good thing if it timed out the stream as well - so unattended live streams don't bog down a lan.
bad; event/video.detection/detection.area/region.name variable does not carry through to your email alert Alarm Name,
thus the fact that it has 4 distinct color and sensitivity regions is useless, since you have no idea which one got triggered.
worse, only the first (orange) color triggers a snapshot attachment to the alert email, no other regions include snapshots.
worse still, there is no live visual aid or audio que to tell you when an alert got triggered while the gui is active.
i was able to associate a WAV file using the Dahau client, but only for the first (orange) trigger.
bad: email alerts occasionally show up without any snapshot attachment - i can't find any reason it's doing this, it just does.
bad: there are no other triggers beyond camera errors and tampering with this june 25th firmware amcrest stuck us with.
* bad: due to this lack of ivs alternatives to it's movement trigger, this ip cam may false on snow, rain drops and shadows.
this will become a major problem the further away your zone is set from the camera without access to line cross ivs,
also the wide sensitivity range of 0-100 is laughable, as only 0-5 seems to do anything meaningful day or night.
bad; so much of the Dahau client won't work with this Amcrest, that it's more trouble to use Dahau in Amcrest's place than it's worth.
so if you were planning on managing both Dahau and Amcrest ip cams under the same SmartPSS client, I would first get an eval unit.
bad; no storage redundancy, it's microsd or FTP or NAS and not any combination of the two or three
however, the NAS page has an "Emergency (Store on SD Card)" to save your ass if NAS is unreachable.
bad; the Storage/NAS page seems to check the proper syntax of your entries, but not if it's actually working
so as long as you type in server address: x.x.x.x and remote directory: //x/x/x -it accepts just about anything.
i have a public share on my lan that anyone can read/write to, even smartphones on wifi - and nothing wrote.
i may setup an FTP tomorrow if i can find the time, just to see if that works any better, but i highly doubt it.
bad: Camera/Video/Snapshot/Interval lowest time slice is a whole second, so every shot you get is a ghostly blur
because it's some composite image of up to 25 1/25th's of a whole second mushed together... so completely worthless.
bad: both of the substreams are "VGA" or 640x480p resolution useless - nothing like Amcrest spec sheet claims.
bad: the mount stem is fixed, which means if you need to point down and left
both by 30°
you are out of luck - unless you are willing to screw the mount into your wall off level,
you can't simply rotate the stem independent of the base you just screwed level into a wall.
bad: many buried options require double saving, meaning you save the page the option was changed
and you must also save on the parent page that option was nested.
bad: the Playback timeline gui is a buggy mess, the only way to reliably replay clips is to use the File List menu.
so, can i say anything good about this amcrest when i compare it to my 2 year old 3mp hikvision cube? i'll try;
good: it's metal bullet case is painted black... this blends in really well mounted between my double hung windows.
"amcrest" is only written on the removable plastic sun shade which i will remove to keep the ip cam brand anonymous.
good: 8mp means more pixels, but as regulars here preach; more pixels mean worse motion blur and worse night vision.
(both of which i'm not concerned with - as my security need is within 20' of where this ip camera will be mounted.
* good: once you take the time to fine tune the zone, motion detect is 95% accurate and of course as with most cams
that come with a microsd memory option, this one retains video the key seconds before the motion is detected.
by comparison my hikvision 3mp cube is 80% accurate while using it's double line pass ivs.
good: it handles portrait (90° or 270°) orientation properly in all aspects of the gui and output files
this is the main reason I have not returned it yet, as many budget ip cams mess this issue up big time.
warning: using 90°|270° limits available resolution to 2688*1520, so if you want to 4K in portrait mode,
too bad - you may as well return this 8mp and buy a 4-5mp, or buy a VESA mount and spin all your monitors...
there's plenty more to like and dislike, but i'm just focusing at the "hands on" stuff for now
all the more reason to DIY swap out this 2.8mm lens if i can live with the handicapped IVS of the current firmware iteration.
