Ehhh...Depends on the time as well as the amount of time and effort you want to put in...It has potential, but lots of bugs/flaws that make it a hassle and impossible to just leave in "auto" mode...WIth Hikvision and Huisun cams I've used for this purpose, it's been more of a "set it and forget it" by just putting everything in auto mode and it adjusts properly for conditions....With this one, it takes daily tweaking (sometimes several times a day) to keep it looking good...Some issues:
White Balance: The auto white balance looks horrible in my opinion during the day. It works great at sunrise/sunset and okay on a cloudy day...but on a sunny day, it's way off! It cranks up the "red" channel too much which makes my grass look brown and the sky look purple. The more sky you have in the picture, the worse this phenomenon gets! There's other preset white balance options listed (Outdoor, Indoor, Natural, Auto, ATW) but ALL of these are the exact same auto white balance. Flip back and forth between these all day and you'll never see any difference. Just that same, identical heavily red-biased auto white balance...The other options (sodium lamp and street lamp) just turn the whole image solid blue and are useless...Fortunately, it does have a manual white balance where you can adjust the red and blue channels and this is the only way to get an acceptable image for me during a sunny day. Problem is, what looks good at lunch time doesn't look good at later in the afternoon; what looks good on a completely sunny sky doesn't look good when clouds roll in. So I'm basically having to keep manually adjusting the white balance values every few hours. Not that big of a deal if you're just casually logging on from time to time to take a look around, but really a pain if you've got a constant FTP upload to the web for the public or are trying to make daily time lapses. Here's an example of a tree/sky background on the auto white balance on a sunny day:
Here's how it looks when I manually adjusted the white balance:
Much better! but again, I have to keep adjusting a few times throughout the day as the sun angle and/or cloud coverage changes in order to keep it looking that good....
Shutter Speed: This was another big disappointment to me as it does not support a 1 second shutter speed, as the specs state..It only goes to 1/3...The sky is fairly lit up in my area due to nearby city lights and I'm able to at least see clouds on 1/3, but the image is a bit noisy...A 1 second shutter speed would have really made this awesome for sky viewing at night and may get just as good of result (if not better) from a less sensitive cam (.01 or .02 LUX) that actually supports a 1 second shutter, compared to this .005 Lux that is capped at only 1/3 second shutter.
Image/Video Format: A more minor complaint, but still a bit annoying at times...The snapshots save as large Bitmap files (typically over 5mb) rather than jpg. I have to open each snap shot and resave them as a jpg...It saves video as a .DAV file rather than something more common/compatible (such as mp4)...The result; none of my players will play the files. Not even VLC, which plays almost anything! I have to play it using software from Dahua. There is a way to convert a saved DAV file to mp4, but in my experience, there's a noticeable quality loss when doing this (image washes out and colors aren't as pure)...You can upload the DAV file directly to Youtube, but it's processing does the same thing (washes out the image and color purity) and sometimes (particularly with longer videos) only part of the video will encode correctly on Youtube. I uploaded about a 2 and a half hour video on Youtube to timelapse. About the first hour and a half plays fine (other than the washed out image quality), but then the second part of the video is just a solid gray screen.
All this said and despite the specs being inaccurate, it definitely has it's pros! As mentioned, sunrise/sunsets on auto white balance look amazing (better than I've gotten with any of my other cams). The zoom is much stronger and the pan/tilt is much faster and with much more range than the Huisun mini-ptz...Wide Dynamic Range seems to work decent, haven't had many issues with images overexposing and the image is very crisp/clear. I've gotten a number of great shots (again, mostly after manually adjusting white balance and so forth).
Overall, I'd give it a rating of about a 2.5 to 3 (out of 5); about the same range as a Huisun, but they each have their different points...The Huisun mini-ptz has the better white balance/color and better automation control, but loses points for it's poor night performance, slow mechanics, limited range and (perhaps most importantly) the high failure rates that have been reported....While the Dahua improves on the range, mechanics and night performance, it loses points on the lack of automation, inaccurate specs and buggy firmware...Hopefully future firmware updates will correct some of the issues (such as the auto white balance performance) and may allow me to upgrade the score to a 3.5 or 4 out of 5 in the future...Only time will tell. Let me know if you have any questions or if there's anything I can help with.
daytime and night time please.