I have two of these in my 21 camera setup. They are the work horse trackers on the front of my house and have been flawless for years. I bought a newer version of this camera several years ago, the ds-2df8236i5x-aelw, which has crappy tracking by comparison. Hikvision had some sort of patent dispute and ended up disabling tracking altogether in some of their cameras with a software update and newer cameras had extremely unreliable tracking compared to the ones from a few years earlier. Hopefully they've gotten past this era. I ended up relegating the ds-2df8236i5x-aelw to side yard duty since it was unreliable.
I haven't found anything equivalent now that has a 1/2" sensor. The TandemVu cameras look interesting but in some demos, the cameras track like the really cheap ones that just jerk to re-center rather than smoothly track the motion with the subject perfectly centered all of the time. I saw one demo of a TandemVu camera showing smooth tracking.
On the camera that failed, I pulled the power supply board from the top of the dome and it had 4 bulging caps two of them leaking moderately. Two other caps failed ESR even though they look fine. Ordered all new caps and will be replacing them tomorrow. Diodes and resistors all checked fine. There are a few small SMCs which I don't really have a way to test. Most of the time with a failed supply board like this, recapping does the trick. But there's a good chance it doesn't fix it and these cameras are 7 years old.
I haven't found anything equivalent now that has a 1/2" sensor. The TandemVu cameras look interesting but in some demos, the cameras track like the really cheap ones that just jerk to re-center rather than smoothly track the motion with the subject perfectly centered all of the time. I saw one demo of a TandemVu camera showing smooth tracking.
On the camera that failed, I pulled the power supply board from the top of the dome and it had 4 bulging caps two of them leaking moderately. Two other caps failed ESR even though they look fine. Ordered all new caps and will be replacing them tomorrow. Diodes and resistors all checked fine. There are a few small SMCs which I don't really have a way to test. Most of the time with a failed supply board like this, recapping does the trick. But there's a good chance it doesn't fix it and these cameras are 7 years old.