Way Too Much Information.. HELP!

[Murphy625]

Hi Folks,

I need to purchase a security camera for a friend for Christmas.. Went searching to find a good value camera for $100 or less and found far too many paid reviews.

Came to this forum and WOW.. talk about information overload.. it would take me a month to go through this forum to even begin.

So I'm just going to ask for a recommendation. I built my friend a computer that runs Windows 8.1 pro with a Core i5-2500k processor, plenty of ram.

I'm looking for an outdoor wireless IP camera.. He'll probably use it indoors and point it out the window but I think a good outdoor camera is best once he realizes he only needs to plug it in to a power outlet.

He lives out in the country and needs to watch his detached garage and barn about 100 feet away.. He has Comcast internet and a wireless router already setup.

I'm looking for a bullet style camera with night vision.. best (most reliable) available for my price range of $100 and something simple.. we don't need it to be techno-geek heavy on features.. so long as it can do the motion detection thing and record to the computer's hard drive or whatever.

Suggestions?

Thank you so much....

 

[Dodutils]

just two things you should take care about when you'll get some answer :

- IR behind a window sometime do not play well because of light reflection you may have to use some trick to avoid this or use external automatic IR light away from camera and if IR light on not enought reach 100 feets, then put IR light source closer to the garage, do the garage have electricity ? But of course an external camera would be a better solution.

- Think about the field of view (how large view the camera's lens show) because the wider is the view angle (smaller mm value for example 3.6mm) the more "remote" you'll see the garage this mean you see a lot of thing around the garage but less thief's details so you may need smaller angle (or buy some camera with zooming capabilities and set it to the best value).

- Also will you friend have its PC running 24/24 ? if not then the camera will need its own internal SDCard storage slot or you'll need a small NVR hardware that will record activity.

- Also think about where you'll locate the camera and take care about sunlight that may blind or reflect badly into camera.

- One more advice, keep the camera "reachable" for easy web spider cleaning in case you get something in front of the lens moving with wind that may trigger a lot of false alarm especially at night with IR active, like this :

but also wind in trees or fast moving cloud shadows can produce false alarms, the best would be to put camera inside the garage so no false alarm ;-)

 

[Murphy625]

Thanks for the reply!
He already has an older analog camera I bought for him years ago.. It has IR leds too and used to feed into his older computer with a special "capture card"...

The problem is that we upgraded his computer from an old WinXP 32 bit machine to a Win8.1pro 64 bit and the "capture card" is no longer compatible.. his old camera connected with a coax cable and BNC connectors at each end.. it worked well for his purpose but not he needs something newer.

 

[looney2ns]

Read this: Dahua 2MP Starlight Lineup

Outside is much more desirable. The turret type cameras do a much better job with their built in illumination.
Get a cam with a 3.6mm or 6mm lense if he cares about identifing any culprits.

Or better yet, is the Starlight Varifocal.

Replace the coax with Cat5e cable, then you only have one wire to deal with, and power the cam with a POE injector. POE=Power over ethernet.