So there are known fakes?
Not sure there are any fake hikvision. I've not seen them mentioned on the forums anyway.
Chinese firmware are not fakes and the hardware is the same, it is just a bit more of a hassle for us to deal with.
As far as box color is concerned, LTS inc (milkisbad thread) ship their cams in brown boxes and those are US firmware. They are not hikvision-branded, though, but fully legit cams, so I'd not put too much credence on brown or retail box for the cams, though maybe it does make a difference when ordering from china directly.
As already mentioned, you can permanently fix a chinese cam with that fix a guy around here offers. A couple months ago, though< i successfully upgraded a chinese region cam to 5.2.0 and it's still 100% english language available. That was using an approach mentioned in a large thread around here about firmware, but the short of it is there is 5.2.0 firmware you can apply against a chinese regiion hikvision and you will still have english. It did require
tftp approach IIRC.