There's a reason why the US government doesn't want to use Dahua and Hikvision equipment; China is one thing, but the other factor is in the instability in both company's product portfolios in the grand scheme of things. Both companies employ small incremental upgrades between successive models; the first question raised by a government employee's mind is, why the hell can't Dahua / Hikvision just do proper research and development (R&D) then sell this damn thing. Customers are essentially guinea pigs not just for these companies but for others as well (that includes US-based companies). As consumers, we want to deploy these cameras in fully functional environments. How dare you tell us to test this model when we literally just spent "xxx" amount of dollars purchasing this model based on the reviews (some half-baked), expecting nothing but the best; then we find out that the AI Marketing is a essentially truly just a metaphorical scam.
That's why I strongly recommend to only buy the cameras you need, use them for a few years, and if the need necessitates, then perform a total upgrade. Otherwise, save your hard-earned money for something else; invest them into retirement! The only way these off-shore companies can stay afloat in this volatile atmosphere is make subtitle changes to their popular models (release some trash models as well) and then make a profit off your hard-earned money. This could damage Dahua's and Hikvision's reputation especially when they release models without properly and thoroughly testing (Recall issues brought up last year, from poorly-locking balls [QC issue] due to increased demand, to Auto-tracking failure, to even poor feedback by ipcamtalk members on Dahua's AI NVR). This forum isn't necessarily a test-bed. It comprises of the everyday consumer that just wants the damn thing to work and to get the best out of its value. Believe it or not, you get what you pay for. Bosch invests millions of dollars in their R&D, that their cameras simply work, but far exceed our budget. Their image sensors
may be vastly superior, but lacks the cost to value ratio. Oh, and Bosch is Made in China too; it doesn't matter where these cameras are made in. What matters is the company philosophy and what consumers expect to get out of it.
The best part about Andy's presence on this forum is that he introduces and sells only the models that he recommends. He doesn't sell trash. Our feedback on Dahua / Hikvision products can only go so far, Andy is able to forward our concerns straight up to the product engineering department. Generally, its profits before people, but with Andy's presence, this stance is in the middle; he will caution people before buying any specific model so kudos to him.
In a marketplace that is now well and truly saturated with installed cameras - AI is the next way of making money Dahua etc. have come up with to try and drive sales while tying everybody into only using their equipment/ecosystem from camera to network switch to NVR exclusively - AI will only be made to work properly when enough people start publicly criticising the fact that it does not work - but knowing Dahua they will probably instead release AI 2.0 Cameras/Equipment and tell everyone to buy another camera instead – Dahua “trust us you will love it – this 2.0 time”.
Always get the feeling that Cameras and NVRs are made and sold by people who have never actually been forced to use their own product on a daily basis 365 days of the year in real world conditions – but I digress.
If you look at some of Dahua’s newer camera releases like the IPC-HDW3549HP-AS-PV Dahua are trying to push cheapo flashing blue and red LED lights and a pair of white LED's like they are some absurd major step forward - criminals will just love being notified by a pair of pretty blue and red flashing LED's on the front of the camera where exactly they are being detected by the cameras IVS tripwires etc - and even worse where they are NOT being picked up by shortcomings in the camera OR a certain combination of clothing colours and backgrounds means they can walk straight past the camera and set off nothing on the camera - wire up an outdoor motion sensor to the camera alarm input terminals to try and avoid that Dahua camera shortcoming re selective colour blindness for motion/IVS.
Like if you read the serial number on the label on the bottom of the camera you can often then remotely log into that camera using Dahua’s etc. remote viewing application – which makes the whole thing a bit of a joke.
If anyone actually wants to tell thieves and criminals where they are and are not being picked up by the camera you can wire your own blue and red flashing LED's to your existing cameras output terminals and have the same silly effect for less than a Dollar in parts.
What Dahua and the rest of the camera manufacturers want to avoid is having to actually increase the size of the image sensor that sits behind the lens - all things being equal on a camera if you increase the image sensor size you will get better night time performance and better daytime performance but as Dahua and the rest of the camera manufacturers (camera assemblers would be a more accurate term) have to buy all their image sensors from various microchip manufacturers (and also Sony) it is a significant fixed cost buying the image sensor so it eats into your profits - the smaller image sensor you can sell to the public in your camera the more money/profit you earn per camera - according to Dahua’s marketing material for the IPC-HDW3549HP-AS-PV supposedly that has a bigger image sensor when compared to what Dahua were using in whatever unspecified comparison of image sensor sizes Dahua are making.
Can anybody explain why above 8 Megapixels there is no True Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) feature available on cameras available from anybody - meaning on the image sensor chip itself (which is supposedly the ultimate according to the camera makers) so if you buy a 12 Megapixel camera you have to make do with Digital Wide Dynamic Range (DWDR) which according to Dahua etc. is inferior – have never found out the reason for 8 Megapixels apparently being the limit for WDR - OR is it because at 12 Megapixels the image sensor has become big enough (and hopefully the individual pixels as well) that WDR is redundant at 12 Megapixels due to the increase of image sensor size? Most 12MP cameras spec sheets say they need less light than an equivalent 8MP.
Axxon Next - the Russian NVR software company have an interesting take by having a firmware plugin that you install into some of Dahua's 12 Megapixel range of cameras that Axxon say does the AI processing within the camera itself and passes the AI results over the network to the PC running Axxon Next - there are free trial versions of the Russian software. Axxon also gives away NVR software licences in Russia when you buy certain cameras.
When I had a go at the Axxon software a couple of years ago it worked but then would stop working in terms of reacting to cameras motion detection outputs (IVS and Motion) so the Russians remoted in to the PC made it work and then it would stop working again for no known reason - that was happening with and without the 12MP camera firmware plug in also on 8MP cameras that cannot take the plug in so we dropped the Russians - but is an interesting concept.
Point being if you can do as much AI processing as possible in the cameras own dedicated image processing hardware there are great efficiency gains to be had - not to mention that as you are processing the raw video image before the in camera compression with H264 or H265 and before further manipulating the raw camera image data into a network IP stream you are getting greater AI accuracy by processing the image data at its most raw and original level - obviously you also need virtually no PC CPU power to run that kind of AI because the cameras themselves are doing 95% of the AI work - so the theory is fantastic it just does not yet work reliably enough to use.
What would really terrify Dahua etc. would be if opensource firmware became available for their camera ranges - then the possibility of backporting new features to old models etc. would mean that the camera makers present business model would be finished – the camera Firmware security updates that Dahua grudgingly releases are probably more to lock opensource firmware out of Dahua cameras and NVR’s than to lock computer hackers out of the cameras!
For an example of mostly opensource firmware take a look at Linux set top boxes – for instance the Vu+ Duo2 – you can load 30 plus different firmware images on that as an alternative to the factory image from Vu+ if only cameras and NVRs went the same way – it is notable that the high end (above 5000 series) Dahua NVR’s are all rackmount PC’s running Linux.
