Just how long should a camera last?

[drekka]

Hi all, after a couple of (horrible) installs of Swann cameras and DVRs, I'm planning to move to a NAS/PoE camera system.

My question is - How long is a reasonable life span of a camera?

I ask this because the systems we've had have all been supplied with the bullet style cameras. We live in a mild climate with typical temperature from 10 to 30 with the odd 0 or 40 degree day. There's 3 cameras exposed to the weather and 1 under a porch. With the systems we've had the typical life time of a camera seems to be between 1and 2 year before it starts feeding distorted video or simply goes dark. Being covered or uncovered doesn't seem to effect the lifespan of the cameras and we've gone through a lot of them.

 

[DavidR1]

Hi all, after a couple of (horrible) installs of Swann cameras and DVRs, I'm planning to move to a NAS/PoE camera system.

My question is - How long is a reasonable life span of a camera?

I ask this because the systems we've had have all been supplied with the bullet style cameras. We live in a mild climate with typical temperature from 10 to 30 with the odd 0 or 40 degree day. There's 3 cameras exposed to the weather and 1 under a porch. With the systems we've had the typical life time of a camera seems to be between 1and 2 year before it starts feeding distorted video or simply goes dark. Being covered or uncovered doesn't seem to effect the lifespan of the cameras and we've gone through a lot of them.

The manufacturer's warranty is probably a good indication of what they feel is a "reasonable life span" but I have to imagine most last far longer than that if there isn't an installation problem that leads to their demise (water infiltration, power problems, excessive heat).

My limited experience to date has been positive. I have a couple of Hikvision cameras which I installed over four years ago that are still working fine. I had one camera from 2016 give me trouble just before the warranty was up (IR cut filter stuck) but it was replaced at no charge and the replacement has been running fine since. We get a wide range of temperatures and precipitation here and they don't seem bothered.

The oldest cams I have are basic bullets which helps I'm sure as there's not much to them. There are a lot more moving parts in a high speed PTZ so I can imagine there would be more things that could go wrong over time. I don't know what the expected lifespan of one of those might be (but I'd be curious to know as I hope to add a few someday).

Have you been able to determine what actually caused the cameras to fail in your installation? Was water getting into them somehow? Power problems? I'd definitely be frustrated too if I had to replace cameras that often (for reasons other than wanting to upgrade or try new tech).

 

[drekka]

There's not been any obvious reasons for the failures. 3 of the cameras are "outdoors" in that they're attached to a wall. But nothing obviously wrong with them. Usually we see things like pixeliated images, IR failures, ghosted images, etc. No real pattern. Sometimes a reboot gets the camera back online, but most of the time we have to replace it. Generally the image quality has been awful, even with the latest pack which uses the Pro 535 cameras.

And to be honest, it's not just the cameras that are the issue for us. It's the NVR, OSX and iPhone software which is some of the worst I've come across in 30 years in IT. Absolutely full of bugs :-(