I totally understand your position on Sony, and in recent years I've tried to pay more attention to what a company does -- and how it handles it when wrongdoings are discovered. And I try to make more informed purchasing decisions that are in alignment with my personal values. And again, there's a whole lot of gray, I'm not criticising anyone here in this forum. We could easily turn this thread into a list of companies that we probably both agree on that have done some shady things, or downright awful things, and even then we might have a different threshold of what we're willing to tolerate personally. We could also turn this thread into a giant political discussion, and I've been trying to avoid that, especially since it's clear there are a lot of people here who are passionate about it, and after all, I'm just trying to solve what I thought was a simple problem that has some personal constraints on my end and trying to be as respectful as possible. Plus I'm also a new user here so I don't want to wade in too deep to the political side here. Although on that note, I'm happy to see there's a lot of flexibility here with what kinds of discussions you allow, so hats off to the moderators for being open minded.
As for specific things that Dahua and Hikvision have been involved in, again, I want to avoid a political thing, and I don't care what administration banned who/what/where since every administration is going to be impacted by politics and have massive inconsistencies to whatever degree (again, a politlcal discussion), but in my own research and reading a number of different sources, I can't support Dahua and Hikvision because of their connection to Uyghur profiling alone. It goes beyond that, but let's just leave it at Uyghur profiling. It doesn't help their case that they are both partly state-owned, which gives no confidence that there will be meaningful accountability and real change any time soon. Again, I'll leave the politics out of it and just focus on the humanity side of it, and reiterate this isn't an anti-China bias. There are other Chinese companies that I feel fine about personally, have shown no connection to the Uyghur situation, and are not partly state-owned.
And again, nothing is black and white. I acknowledge that there are many factors here and many folks may feel passionately on one side or the other with regard to Dahua and Hikvision. These are very serious things and emotionally charged issues. In my case, what I've researched has crossed my personal threshold and I feel pretty good about searching for different camera providers. Hope that makes sense, and I don't mean to be soft on details, but they are easy to find, and I also don't want to derail the purpose of this thread, which is just to find some darn cameras that are "affordable" (in quotes given that I know I've now eliminated the two biggest sources of objectively affordable cameras), and meet my personal specs. Respect and cheers to all here, and continued thanks for your help finding cameras!
And as for Black Friday, yes, I will try to take advantage of any deals I can find.
www.foreign.senate.gov
ipvm.com
