I will be controversial and say 8MP/4K Cameras are the way of the future (also as TV resolution is moving to 4K it is not likely to become an orphan/odd resolution that will need scaling to fit on every viewing screen - but you can view 4K images on a regular non 4K screen) - it is incredible how much you can zoom in on recordings.
I have
Dahua IPC-HFW5831E-ZE which has the ability to see in full colour at night just with the neighbourhood streetlights - when there was a power cut the UPS supplied power and the IR led's on the cameras came on and the image went to black and white - power came back - cameras back to colour IR led's went out and UPS started recharging its batteries.
Choice of camera body - the model I listed is a bullet camera that probably offers the best image quality as the lens is looking through a straight piece of plastic and the 4 IR led's cannot reflect into the lens HOWEVER you want to mount the cameras as low to the ground as you dare to get shots of peoples faces under hats etc. BUT those people will take flying leaps at the cameras to try and swivel them away from looking at what you are protecting - it takes them about 5 minutes of flying leaps before the camera is finally looking somewhere else - they can only move them very slowly with a lot of perseverance - then they realise the cameras are installed in pairs at opposite ends of the building looking at each other - then they run off!
Having said that you may want a dome camera instead so it is impossible to adjust which way the camera is looking/pointing - change the HFW part of the model number to get the same camera specification in a different dome style case HOWEVER there might be a slight compromise in image quality as the lens is now effectively looking out through a fishbowl and there might be slight IR reflections as IR led's and lens are now looking through the same piece of fishbowl BUT nobody can move your camera so camera security protection will be maintained - probably use a bracket with the dome camera so dome hangs down re rain and IR reflections at dome edge.
The varifocal (power zoom) lenses are higher quality optically so give a better image than the fixed lens cameras - worth having even if you never zoom them in.
Get out your mobile phone go up a ladder and take pictures from where you are thinking of putting the cameras - it will make you think.
Think that YouTube video is the South African Ecological time - his heart is in the right place but for some reason he has bought 4+ NVRs none of which are in the higher Dahua 5000 model range - which matters otherwise you will not have IVS on the timeline which he complains about but continues to still buy NVR's below the 5000 range - having said that Dahua used to support IVS on a handful of the sub 5000 series NVRs and removed that NVR IVS support with a firmware update for those NVR's (from what I have been told) so maybe Phil from SA got it right originally before Dahua nailed him?!
Run it over PoE using either a PoE network switch or a NVR with built in PoE - use a UPS to power it all - otherwise a 10 second power cut means around 2 minutes for everything to power up reboot and get back to recording.
Did I mention eyeball cameras? Trouble is (this is a couple of years before I had any cameras) hoodlums seem rather good at popping them out of their bracket and leaving them hanging by their cable - personally I would stick to Bullet or Dome style.
You will need a hard disk - if you have hard disks lying around you can use those up - or you can buy - consider that Hard disks (and RAM and CPU's) are all manufactured and then graded according to quality because they will all come out of the manufacturing process at a different level of quality/tolerance so a hard disk that doesn't make the best grade will be sold as a lower grade - so for Western Digital from lowest to highest is Green, Blue, Purple, Red, Black, Gold and then Ultrastar - pick something with a 5 year warranty and 7200RPM spin speed considering that what does not make the grade as Black drops through the ranks until it becomes a Green 5,000rpm 2 year(awful) warranty (used to be 3 year warranty that generation of WD Greens were quite good)
Green - me? I am a fanatic who was going to get a Gold 10TB then instead bought a
WD Ultrastar 10TB - both of those are full of Helium instead of air and are then sealed shut by being welded shut using a laser (no kidding - Helium is one of the smallest molecules there is) so no
dust or
moisture can ever enter the drive which eliminates 2 major Hard Disk failure points - leaving only physical shock and electrical surge.
The irony being that at the time Dahua NVR's and also the free Dahua Smart PSS program that can turn any PC into an NVR will not recognise any 10TB HDD's from anybody because they cannot comprehend such an enormous amount of disk space -
anyway decided that a 10TB Ultrastar is simply too good just for recording appalling human riff-raff, derelicts and degenerates so am instead using it for bulk storage for my files and using up other disks instead - have to say the speed of a 10TB Ultrastar is mind blowing for a single spinning disk - can run Virtual Machines on it that are recording CCTV onto another portion of the same disk all virtaulised - wow.
Yes resolution is king for capturing which neighbour is misbehaving (you mention a neighbours Dog - ever seen the film "
the 'Burbs"?) - before you know it you will be considering 12MP! For some reason (nobody will tell me why) "WDR" is only available up to 8MP all the 12MP have the supposedly inferior "DWDR" - you do want to be able to identify peoples faces and car number plates when they think they are out of range before they cover up as they approach.
Shielded
Cat5e STP cable is cheap and plentiful solid copper core only and no patch cables re voltage drop - buy decent quality ends to crimp on for some reason people compete to buy the cheapest RJ45 connectors known to man and then are surprised they have to keep cutting them off and replacing them - the gold plating is thinner among other things.
Consider lens angle - the part number I list is about 120 degree horizontal coverage - the neighbours will not be safe where they think they cannot be seen - think about it - lens angle means you can cover a huge area with a high resolution to back it up everybody is in range even when they think they are not!
Hope you gain from my experience! Click "Like" if you want.
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