Joined to get help (Logitech Alert Customer)

[rottielover]

Greetings.

I'm Scott from St. Louis and I've had a Logitech Alert system since about the time they started selling them.

I currently have an outdoor camera and one indoor camera (the indoor is the old model that did not have IR at the time). Recently I decided it was time to get another camera for my backyard and that's when I discovered that Logitech has left it's loyal Alert Customers high and dry. They've discontinued the product line. (I've got lots of Logitech stuff, and I swear I will never buy another item from them).

That said anyone still active on the Logitech forums has basically pointed me in the direction of Blue Iris.

Sadly I have not had time to do ANY research what-so-ever yet.

If anyone here is a former Alert system user, I sure would be grateful for some advice to get me started.

I installed the Alert system myself, and I'm not worried about being overly technical, but I don't have tons of money to spend either. Blue Iris is appealing due to the price point and features, but I'm certianly willing to learn about anything else that might be recommended.

Basically I have my outdoor Alert camera watching my front porch and driveway, the inside camera is watching my basement windows, and I wanted to add another camera for a few years in the backyard, but my wife and I always had other priorities for the money till now.

 

[fenderman]

Welcome to the forum. Blue iris is great, but you need to learn to use it and have a pc capable of handling the load, but with 3 cameras you dont need anything crazy.
What are the specs on the pc you are using for the logitech right now?
If you are satisfied with the logitech picture quality the easiest and cheapest thing to do would be to buy another logitech camera on ebay.

 

[rottielover]

The 700 outdoor camera used to be around $250 (that's what I bought mine for). They are going for 500 and up on ebay now because of being discontinued.

I'm not worried about my PC. It's a custom built rig with a Core i7-2600k OC'd to 4.5 Ghz, 16 Gb of RAM and I have a 1.8 TB RAID array dedicated to the security cam recordings.

So I am at the point that I'm thinking I would like to eventually phase out of the Logitech hardware (again my camera's are several years old now), and get some updated cameras.

No immediate need other than I might get Blue Iris sooner rather than later so that I can get the current camera's configured with it.

 

[fenderman]

Got it..then you will be fine...download the demo and play with it. As an aside, did you measure the power consumption before and after overclocking?

 

[rottielover]

I'm playing with it now actually, got both camera's up and running with no effort (I had previously set my DHCP server to give them a set IP I wanted them to have so that made things a lot easier).

I never measured the power consumption, sorry.

Any recommendations on camera's? One feature of the Logitech Cams I loved was the microSD card recording. The camera's record to the card at the Logitech software just pulled those recordings later as needed. (Basically didn't have to have the software running 24/7 if you tuned the motion settings well enough).

 

[fenderman]

If you are not going to use blue iris 24/7 and just want a camera with and SD card, then blue iris is pointless in your case.
Hikvision and Dahua make very good reasonably priced cameras in the 100-300 range (depending on model and where you buy).
If you want sd card, then the hikvision ds-2cd 2532, 2632 and 2732 are worth a look. All have different features and there are lots of posts about all of them here.

 

[rottielover]

I was just describing the feature. There's been a time or two that my daughter has turned off my computer, etc. So I wanted to look for camera's / software setup that could accomplish the same thing that the alert system allowed me to, which is to not loose a motion capture just because my PC is not running the software at that exact moment in time for whatever reason.

 

[fenderman]

Gotcha, yes those cameras are a good place to start...dahua makes some with sd cards as well. Both brands are a great value for quality reliable cameras.