Suggestion: IP cams for my new home

[foxh]

When my home was built I ran cat to any soffit that I could want a turret camera.
Previous home I have unifi G3 and G4 doorbell (all HD 2MP) which recorded on the single hard drive cloud key gen 2+. These cameras and doorbell were piped into homekit through homebridge.
New home I still plan to pipe the cameras into homekit but likely through scrypted. Probably 2-4 cameras. Even though I'll be using homekit it has 1080p limited storage so I want a NVR. I don't feel the need for color vision light beams and I don't want to power a blue iris box. I do have a synology with 2 camera licenses if it would be better to use that as a NVR. I'm not really impressed with unifi's expensive offerings but I could be wrong.
I know reolink is the budget go to and a 4 camera setup would accomplish my new home goals. BUT I'm here for better recommendations with a larger sensor. It looks like some Annke are really hikvisions that work with scrypted. This is sort of the direction I'm looking but would appreciate any suggestions.

 

[wittaj]

Stay away from Reolink if all you care about is what time something happened. At night the quality will be poor.

See this thread that lists out the most commonly suggested cameras for the distance to IDENTIFY. These represent the best value in terms of performance day and night, cost, and reliability:

The Importance of Focal Length over MP in camera selection

At the urging of several folks here, I created a thread to show the importance of focal length and how focal length can be more important than megapixels (MP). I mentioned some of this in the post regarding The Hookup’s latest video demonstrating different cameras, including one sold from a...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[mat200]

When my home was built I ran cat to any soffit that I could want a turret camera.
Previous home I have unifi G3 and G4 doorbell (all HD 2MP) which recorded on the single hard drive cloud key gen 2+. These cameras and doorbell were piped into homekit through homebridge.
New home I still plan to pipe the cameras into homekit but likely through scrypted. Probably 2-4 cameras. Even though I'll be using homekit it has 1080p limited storage so I want a NVR. I don't feel the need for color vision light beams and I don't want to power a blue iris box. I do have a synology with 2 camera licenses if it would be better to use that as a NVR. I'm not really impressed with unifi's expensive offerings but I could be wrong.
I know reolink is the budget go to and a 4 camera setup would accomplish my new home goals. BUT I'm here for better recommendations with a larger sensor. It looks like some Annke are really hikvisions that work with scrypted. This is sort of the direction I'm looking but would appreciate any suggestions.

Welcome @foxh

Few members go the Synology route .. gets pricey after the 1st 2 cameras for what you get ..

This appears to be the most popular option for most here:
Blue Iris VMS running on a used business class PC ( HP or Dell, most looking at 8th gen intel as the starting point .. )
PoE switch
Dahua OEM or Hikvision OEM cameras with larger sensors

expect to end up with 2x more cameras than you imagined ..

For example my base expectations to cover the front of a house:
2 cameras covering the driveway
2 cameras covering the front door ( one at face level, one covering package drop zone )
1 camera on each side of the house ( 2 )

so that's 6 cameras already for the base starting point ..

Do check out the cliff notes and the DORI concept, as once you notice that you may want to also cover the street and parking area in front of your house that adds more cameras, and the LPR section if you want to get license plate captures at night .. that's another 1-2 cameras ..

note, recommend also this thread ..
The Typical picture of a Perp on Nextdoor-type Apps with Consumer Grade Cameras like Ring, Nest, Arlo, Canary, Wyze, etc.

The Typical picture of a Perp on Nextdoor-type Apps with Consumer Grade Cameras like Ring, Nest, Arlo, Canary, Wyze, etc.

Love these posts on Nextdoor type apps LOL. This thread will be used for members to post the poor quality consumer grade type camera images that we see people post to the Nextdoor type apps. Can anyone make out this person that went thru their cars LOL.... And this thread is where members...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[foxh]

I read over the suggested reading articles. I'm narrowing down on two of either the 4MP or 8MP versions of this camera. One for the driveway (sidewalk 30ft away, street starts 40ft away). One for rear side door about 20ft away. Guess I'll try out the synology for NVR. Any idea if these support scrypted?
4MP

https://www.amazon.com/EmpireTech-IPC-T5442T-ZE-Vari-Focal-Eyeball-Starlight/dp/B08C77TNY9

8MP

https://www.amazon.com/EmpireTech-2-7mm-12-0mm-Vari-Focal-IPC-T5842T-ZE-IPC-HDW5831R-ZE/dp/B09JFW767F