He really marked up the materials!!! Cameras and NVR are about $1,000; $150 for the doorbell, and who knows what kind of HDD but say $200 tops.
When an installer is wanting to put in something you buy at Costco, they will leave everything on default settings and are looking to make a quick buck. Ask him if he will dial the camera parameters in to each field of view for day and night settings or if he just hangs them up and calls them good.
Lorex is a consumer based water down version made by Dahua.
Lorex uses less than ideal MP/sensor ratios and cheaper materials.
For example, these are 8MP (4K) cameras put on a sensor designed for 2MP.
It will be dark at night and basically useless. A 2MP will kick its butt all night long.
Many people here started with Lorex and quickly (within a year or two) started to upgrade to better cameras. As someone says here, better to buy once, cry once than to spend this kinda money and start replacing within a year because it doesn't perform.
My 2MP cameras outperform my neighbors 4K (8MP) cameras....why....because they are both on the same size sensor.
When we had a thief come thru here and get into a lot of cars, the police couldn't use one video or photo from anyone's system but mine. Not even my other neighbors $1,300 4k Lorex system from Costco provided useful info - the cams just didn't cut it at night. His system wasn't even a year old and after that event has started replacing with cameras purchased from
@EMPIRETECANDY here based on my recommendation and seeing my results. He is still shocked a 2MP camera performs better than his 4k cameras... It is all about the amount of light needed and getting the right camera for the right location.
The NVRs from the box units like a
Amcrest and Lorex cap out incoming bandwidth (which impacts the resolution and FPS of the cameras). The Lorex and Amcrest NVR maxes out at 80Mbps and truly only one or a couple cameras that will display 4K. My neighbor with his 4k Lorex Costco system was limited to that and he is all upset it isn't 4K for all eight channels and he was capped out at 4096 bitrate on each camera so it was a pixelated mess.
Bandwidth limitations are how much data can pass from all the cameras into the NVR and back out. Resolution, FPS, and bitrate determine the Mbps and a 4k camera needs more than 4096 bitrate but because the NVR couldn't handle it, even though he set 8192 in the camera, the NVR cut it half.
If you all you care about is to look around and see some things, but not be able to IDENTIFY, then that is probably an OK system. But most want to be able to IDENTIFY when a perp comes by.
Vary rarely does having 10 of the same fixed lens camera work.
Take a look at this thread. It will help bring you up to speed on what is out there and what to look for.
You need to decide what your goals are of the system and then get the correct cameras for that situation. Most of us have a mix of varifocal, fixed lens, PTZ, etc.
At the urging of several folks here, I created a thread to show the importance of focal length and how focal length can be more important than megapixels (MP). I mentioned some of this in the post regarding The Hookup’s latest video demonstrating different cameras, including one sold from a...
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