Mini bullet style PTZ recommendation (outdoor)

[pcam]

Hi Everyone.

I've got a pretty extensive system with Blue Iris at the heart and something like 20 PoE cameras all around my property. For many locations fixed cameras are fine, but there are a number of locations I want PTZ cameras so I can aim them at different things when I want. I currently have three different type of PTZ cameras - dome, mini bullet, and the larger speed dome type.

The dome cameras are fine, for places where I have a ceiling to mount them to, like the front door, but they don't work wall mounted vertically on a wall as the PTZ travel is in the wrong directions. I know you can get brackets to mount them off a wall but in a horizontal orientation, but I am not particularly fond of that look.

The speed dome cameras work well, but they are rather large and unsightly.

The footprint I like the most are the two mini bullet PTZ cameras I have as they don't look any different than a fixed bullet camera, for the most part. But, they are Huisun cameras with firmware that only can be accessed using Internet Explorer, and, this is the worst part, I discovered recently that one or both of them has been the cause of my Bonjour troubles that has been going on for years, which causes all of my Apple devices to constantly have their network name renumbered like "Apple TV (246)". As soon as I took them off the network, that silliness stopped.

So, my question for the forum is, are there good bullet style PTZ cameras out there that (a) can take an SD card (the Shenter / Rstreng ones I just bought take TF cards and I can't figure out how to open it to get to the motherboard) and (b) have a more modern firmware that can be configured with browsers other than IE, which has been replaced with the new Chromezilla based Edge that can't support that older firmware.

Here are the old Huisun cameras.



These are what I bought to replace them, which I can't figure out how to open to access the TF slot.



The firmware appears to be a newer version of the old camera. I think the old camera had version 1.x this one is 2.1.1.



It still only works with Internet Explorer sadly.

I appreciate any help.

Peter

 

[pcam]

Okay, I learned a couple of things. There is a small hole on the front face plate at the top. These mini bullet cameras come with a small tool that fits in there an allows you to pull the face plate off. Then you can remove the four screws to pull out the guts of the cameras. The TF card slot is accessible inside, sandwiched between a board and the inside chassis.

Secondly: TF cards were the precursors for SD cards. A TF card can not be used in an SD card slot, but an SD card is backwards compatible with a TF card slot.

I'm gonna give this camera go and see how it does. Hopefully it doesn't cause issues like its predecessor. Nonetheless, I am going to vlan all of my IIP cameras at some point so they are sandboxed on the network.

 

[looney2ns]

Study this and the links there in.

 

[pcam]

Thanks, helpful stuff.

One thing I don't necessarily agree with though; I do use Arlo cameras. While I don't expect much out of them for the video quality, I have them in key places mostly as a motion detection system, with video. Since IP camera motion detection is far too noisy for alerting because of false positives, I've found the Arlo camera IR motion detection to be pretty reliable. I have about 10 of them spread around my hard scheduled to arm in the evening until morning automatically. Typically when I get an Arlo alert, I then go to Blue Iris to see what is going on.