Need advice on a low cost PoE Dome camera to monitor my driveway.

[Tiger_Claw]

Hi guys

I need some quick advice.

I’m looking to purchase an outdoor dome camera (non-ptz) to monitor my driveway. The driveway accommodates two vehicles and I want to place the camera at the center of the garage door, just below the roofs eve. The height isn’t that great (only about 8.5 feet). What’s important here is that the camera will be used to capture/record/send alerts on movement detection only (not 24/7record). This means I need to avoid capturing street activity and focus on my vehicles and driveway only.

I park the vehicles very close to the garage door and will keep them far enough apart as not to aid in someone reaching the camera by standing on a front bumper.

The camera would ideally have a wide enough field of view to at least capture 75% of each windshield as well as the front/back doors of both vehicles’ facing the center of the driveway (not necessarily the doors facing the driveway perimeter).

I use Blue Iris so the camera needs to be supported by that software. I’ve already ordered a PoE injector, Ethernet cable and an 8 port gigabit switch. All that remains is the camera.

Since I’m already running 9 cameras I need to keep the mega pixelsin/around 1.3-3 megapixels as not to bog-down my PC’s performance too much. 720HD or 1080 HD res would be fine if the picture quality is good enough for both day/night surveillance.

My preferred price range shouldn’t exceed $150 (if possible), preferably lower.

Tiger

 

[dalepa]

get 2 DS-2CD3345-I for $144 for over the garage

One 4mm will be enough for most places, but 2 will give you double the view and double the IR

 

[Tiger_Claw]

get 2 DS-2CD3345-I for $144 for over the garage

One 4mm will be enough for most places, but 2 will give you double the view and double the IR

Is this the one? Link

Never heard of Shinning Brand before. Is there an online USA merchant you might also recommend?

In all honesty tho.. I was hoping for a closed dome to make tampering a little more problematic and less intrusive to local spider webs, etc.

Tiger

 

[fenderman]

Is this the one? Never heard of Shinning Brand before. Is there an online USA merchant you might also recommend?

In all honesty tho.. I was hoping for a closed dome to make tampering a little more problematic and less intrusive to local spider webs, etc.

Tiger

That is a hikvision camera.
That turret design is MUCH better at avoiding spider webs in your image than a dome or bullet.
See nellys security or LTS (milkisbad thread) if you want a US supplier and/or a US region hikvision cam. You can go with the 2mp version for better low light performance.

 

[dalepa]

I don't see a 4MP DS-2CD3345-I turret currently on amazon, just the 2.8mm 4MP version which is too wide for over the garage IMHO. but the 3mp version is on Amazon here

 

[jasauders]

I'm quite happy with my EyeSurv domes from Nelly's. I see they are currently out of stock (first I've seen this), but perhaps an email to them would get some insight on the ETA for more.

http://www.nellyssecurity.com/cameras/hi-def-cameras/ip-cameras/3-mp/eyesurv-esip-apex3-dm3-hi-def-3-mp-weatherproof-mini-dome-ip-camera.html

I was skeptical about some of the issues I've read about certain domes, but I've had exactly zero complaints about these. It seems as if the rubber gasket inside plants itself right against the glass, thereby negating the IR glare you sometimes see from other dome manufacturers. Rockin 4 of these gizmos. Very happy with them.

I don't have any (good) screenshots handy at the moment, but I took a quick snapshot of a YouTube video I did of my camera "grid". You can see the upper left one is for my driveway if it gives any insight. I'll be able to post a better picture later today.

 

[Del Boy]

Huisun 2MP 10x is also a shout at that price.

 

[nayr]

eh, stick a dome outside with UV exposure (Sunlight) and watch the image slowly turn to shit in a a year or less as the plastics loose clarity and start to fog up.

domes work much better indoors, but in almost all cases turrets will be far superior.. the vandal resistance is moot when a mask and a can of paint will defeat em both.

 

[Jack B Nimble]

domes suck..turrets rock

 

[Kawboy12R]

Nayr is underestimating the clarity life of dome bubbles by quite a bit. Well, at least good domes. YMMV if you use dollar store domes. I've got some almost 4 years old and the bubbles are like new. I like them outdoors under eaves with their IR turned off. Exposed to rain etc and dependant upon their internal IR, well, not so much. Turrets have significant advantages if you need to use the internal IR. I'd recommend against it though unless you live in an arid climate with no flying bugs. Wet weather and bugs light up from internal IR like crazy.

 

[nayr]

it depends on the environment, Ive seen Hikvision and Dahua domes exposed to sun pretty much all day long start to show clarity issues after a year.. UV is a high frequency radiation, and given enough time it will degrade all plastics.. especially PET used in domes, the stabilizers they add to plastics to help them last longer outdoors in effect make the polymers opaque, so you cant really UV treat clear plastics, and even the treating only delays the inevitable.

glass lens covers on non-domes have no such issues.. but a glass dome would be not very vandal resistant now would it? If you can keep your domes from getting sunburned then they may never show any impacts outdoors.. but its something you need to consider when deploying domes outside.

of course YMMV, but generally its a poor idea.. replacement domes are rarely avilable.

 

[Kawboy12R]

Under eaves protected from the elements and domes are happy. Exposed to sun and rain? Choose bullets or turrets. But yeah, finding replacement dome bubbles that fit perfectly isn't always easy. I'd have gotten a Darkfighter turret instead of a dome if they'd been available. I didn't really want the large bullet but then I went and mounted a Huisun 10x PTZ on the other end of the house to replace a Hik turret. Go figure... The Huisun might be replaced with a "normal" PTZ sometime in the not-so-distant future.

 

[LittleBrother]

Get the turret, it looks boss as well. Word of caution many have missed events that happened in front of their cams because they relied too much on motion that failed to fire. To reliably catch events odds are you'll have its sensitivity so high you'll get a ton of false positives anyway.

 

[Tiger_Claw]

I don't see a 4MP DS-2CD3345-Iturret currently on amazon, just the 2.8mm 4MP version which is too wide for over the garage IMHO. but the 3mp version is on Amazon here

I was going to make the purchase until I noticed the feedback on the sellers (not camera). It's really a bummer that you won't get tech support either unless it's an authorized distributed. WTF.

I took a risk and purchased this GW Security Dome instead. It has a manually adjustable Varifocal lense from 2.8-12mm. The housing is all metal and the bubble is glass. I got it up and working today and the image quality is really nice, but my CPU jumped from 55% to 75% utilization during day/color mode. That's an increadable jump considering the 55% was with 9 720p cameras running.

Im hoping to reduce the load by virtue of adjusting the camera down to a smaller resolution, but need some questions answered from the seller first.

Outside of that the camera was perfect for the job, but the limited height where it was placed limited me to how high up I could point the lense. The issue here was tilting the lense almost horizontal would start to cover the upper most LED lights inside the dome housing. That means I can't lower the camera below my rain gutter to capture street activity, even if I wanted to. Lucky for me it at least covers the sidewalk just in front of my driveway.

In short, the turret camera would have been a better choice and wouldn't have that problem, but for this application the dome worked for me.

So the lesson learned here is that domes might be limited to how high you raise the lense if the camera is mounted in/around 8.5 feet off the ground. Turrent and bullet cameras don't have this issue.

PS... Thank you all for providing feedback. You sold me on the Turrent cam and I will begin using them to replace my 720's at a later date. Just need to build a powerhouse of a PC platform to handle it.

It's nuts how much load all these cams can place on a reasonably powerful PC.

Tiger

 

[Q™]

I was going to make the purchase until I noticed the feedback on the sellers (not camera). It's really a bummer that you won't get tech support either unless it's an authorized distributed. WTF...

You get what you pay for. Buy from Nelly's or LTS and you can have support, and firmware upgrades. Buy a Chinese region camera from AliExpress or Amazon and you're on your own.

...It's nuts how much load all these cams can place on a reasonably powerful PC...

It's math.

 

[tangent]

It's nuts how much load all these cams can place on a reasonably powerful PC.

A dedicated NVR can be more efficient.

 

[fenderman]

A dedicated NVR can be more efficient.

And also missing lots of function.

 

[tangent]

And also missing lots of function.

I realize a good NVR can cost as much or more than a low end pc and that the cheap NVR's certainly have limitations. I'm curious what you see as the biggest advantages of blue iris over an NVR. Better motion detection and software you can trust?

 

[nayr]

if you record continuously, and I see very little reason not to with massive storage space widely avilable.. then a hardware NVR is missing what functionality? BI has excellent external motion processing and thats a given, but if your function is simply to record video and review it easily.. then a hardware NVR has all the functionality nessicary.

and while I have little reason to suspect BI.. I have every reason to suspect Microsoft, so just requiring windows as a base means BI is not software I can trust any more than my Chinese NVR..

 

[Q™]

Nayr, have you run Blue Iris software recently?