Worlds First Review - Dahua DH-IPC-HDW5849H-ASE-LED / IPC-Color4K-T - 2.8mm Turret

If this camera were put up against say a bullet with the same focal length and sensor size) is there any reason to go with the bullet over the pano? First half dozen pages or so on this thread I saw mention of the image stitching producing some weird results depending on the distance of the object to the camera. Is that really the only downside if everything else is equal?

I think you meant this in the stitched 180 camera thread not the 4K/T thread?

Regardless this camera and the 180 each serve a different role and you need to select the correct camera for what your goals are.
 
I think you meant this in the stitched 180 camera thread not the 4K/T thread?

Regardless this camera and the 180 each serve a different role and you need to select the correct camera for what your goals are.
I did sorry - not sure why my reply ended up here. I'll remove my post and get it put into the correct thread. Sorry about that.
 
Andy some possible firmware issues / improvement suggestions to Dahua:

1. General suggestion - the camera appears to be underpowered on either cpu or memory or both for running the features it has. It seems to struggle to me to run multiple features even when not running everything.

2. Issues with forgetting - maybe related to 1., the camera tends to occasionally forget / revert settings especially for image settings and encoding - bit rates change, codec and sub stream 1 which I have switches off, switches on. Sometimes immediately after saving, sometimes several logins later even if IE is used.

3. Possible issue with BLC (could be either the camera or BI) - BLC works great but appears to only apply to substream (or alternatively it applies to both and watching the mainstream causes excess contrast / sharpening to be applied in BI - unsure 100% as to the cause - maybe the extra detail in the mainstream needs compensating for?).

Either way, BLC works great on custom - probably could be tweaked even better. However, the moment you switch to a mainstream recording eg on object detection or on playback, the BLC affected area becomes un-compensated and blows out with contrast and sharpness, often looking like a painting:

4. Image settings - Schedule sliders. With the way they work, they don't auto close gaps (are "magnetic") if you slide them very close to each other. The result is if you draw a schedule for eg day and night, it's:

i. Near impossible to set a precise change over time as you get one on the correct time and then when you move the other one it moves over it and goes to a time past that you intended. It's very difficult to get both to align

ii. As a result of the alignment, it's possible to get a very small gap between the schedule. If this occurs eg at the start of the schedule it starts at 00.00 hours, you wil get your camera suddenly switching to day settings at 00.00 hours because where no schedule is drawn the default is daytime. This then leaves your camera black for a few seconds / minutes until the schedule gap is passed. It might seem obvious don't leave gaps in the schedule, but these gaps can be so small as impossible to see but will leave tens of secodnds where your camera is in daylight settings at midnight!

Sure it can all be fixed, but I feel a few tweaks are needed either to the hardware, firmware or both.
 
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Andy some possible firmware issues / improvement suggestions to Dahua:

1. General suggestion - the camera appears to be underpowered on either cpu or memory or both for running the features it has. It seems to struggle to me to run multiple features even when not running everything.

2. Issues with forgetting - maybe related to 1., the camera tends to occasionally forget / revert settings especially for image settings and encoding - bit rates change, codec and sub stream 1 which I have switches off, switches on. Sometimes immediately after saving, sometimes several logins later even if IE is used.

3. Possible issue with BLC (could be either the camera or BI) - BLC works great but appears to only apply to substream (or alternatively it applies to both and watching the mainstream causes excess contrast / sharpening to be applied in BI - unsure 100% as to the cause - maybe the extra detail in the mainstream needs compensating for?).

Either way, BLC works great on custom - probably could be tweaked even better. However, the moment you switch to a mainstream recording eg on object detection or on playback, the BLC affected area becomes un-compensated and blows out with contrast and sharpness, often looking like a painting:

4. Image settings - Schedule sliders. With the way they work, they don't auto close gaps (are "magnetic") if you slide them very close to each other. The result is if you draw a schedule for eg day and night, it's:

i. Near impossible to set a precise change over time as you get one on the correct time and then when you move the other one it moves over it and goes to a time past that you intended. It's very difficult to get both to align

ii. As a result of the alignment, it's possible to get a very small gap between the schedule. If this occurs eg at the start of the schedule it starts at 00.00 hours, you wil get your camera suddenly switching to day settings at 00.00 hours because where no schedule is drawn the default is daytime. This then leaves your camera black for a few seconds / minutes until the schedule gap is passed. It might seem obvious don't leave gaps in the schedule, but these gaps can be so small as impossible to see but will leave tens of secodnds where your camera is in daylight settings at midnight!

Sure it can all be fixed, but I feel a few tweaks are needed either to the hardware, firmware or both.
5. Mic audio is terrible
 
How are you listening to it?
I've noticed with some of olmy dahua cameras the audio is virtually unusable when using one way and works perfectly fine another way.

I don't normally listen to the audio though so I can't recall if it works ok through the browser or the app or direct from the camera or via the NVR.
 
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It's a pity no-one makes a small quality mic and speaker you can plug in for a reasonable price. I looked for a speaker but they're mostly giant horns and cost upwards of £70 even without a mic.
 
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Andy some possible firmware issues / improvement suggestions to Dahua:

1. General suggestion - the camera appears to be underpowered on either cpu or memory or both for running the features it has. It seems to struggle to me to run multiple features even when not running everything.

2. Issues with forgetting - maybe related to 1., the camera tends to occasionally forget / revert settings especially for image settings and encoding - bit rates change, codec and sub stream 1 which I have switches off, switches on. Sometimes immediately after saving, sometimes several logins later even if IE is used.

3. Possible issue with BLC (could be either the camera or BI) - BLC works great but appears to only apply to substream (or alternatively it applies to both and watching the mainstream causes excess contrast / sharpening to be applied in BI - unsure 100% as to the cause - maybe the extra detail in the mainstream needs compensating for?).

Either way, BLC works great on custom - probably could be tweaked even better. However, the moment you switch to a mainstream recording eg on object detection or on playback, the BLC affected area becomes un-compensated and blows out with contrast and sharpness, often looking like a painting:

4. Image settings - Schedule sliders. With the way they work, they don't auto close gaps (are "magnetic") if you slide them very close to each other. The result is if you draw a schedule for eg day and night, it's:

i. Near impossible to set a precise change over time as you get one on the correct time and then when you move the other one it moves over it and goes to a time past that you intended. It's very difficult to get both to align

ii. As a result of the alignment, it's possible to get a very small gap between the schedule. If this occurs eg at the start of the schedule it starts at 00.00 hours, you wil get your camera suddenly switching to day settings at 00.00 hours because where no schedule is drawn the default is daytime. This then leaves your camera black for a few seconds / minutes until the schedule gap is passed. It might seem obvious don't leave gaps in the schedule, but these gaps can be so small as impossible to see but will leave tens of secodnds where your camera is in daylight settings at midnight!

Sure it can all be fixed, but I feel a few tweaks are needed either to the hardware, firmware or both.

My experiences as it relates to your comments:

1. I am a big advocate of running devices under their rated spec, just like we don't want a computer running at 100%, we don't want to run a camera at all rated specs. With that said, I haven't seen the issues you are experiencing. I tested with max FPS, bitrate, and several IVS and it worked as intended. That isn't how I normally run the camera, but I did test it out.

2. That has not been my experience. Did you even open it up in anything other than IE? I have seen that happen if a camera is opened in a different browser.

3. I haven't tested this as I work very hard to not use backlight. I will test this.

4. I agree the sliders are cumbersome. If you click on the timeline, the actual start and stop time to the second pops up and I manually type those in so that I don't experience the gaps.

I am buying and using these cameras for the video. The audio is just a bonus. It isn't the best but it does do its job. I have added this external mic to a few critical cameras to get better audio or add a mic to a non-audio camera.

 
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I am buying and using these cameras for the video. The audio is just a bonus. It isn't the best but it does do its job. I have added this external mic to a few critical cameras to get better audio or add a mic to a non-audio camera.


This is designed to be put in line with the 12v dc line running to the camera with power coming from wall and into mic then out of mic and into camera. Will the POE cameras "back-power" the mic? Will the 12v dc in from the camera powered if the camera is powered by POE instead? There's a comment on that amazon page that seems to say it is but another comment where someone couldn't get it powered.
 
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This is designed to be put in line with the 12v dc line running to the camera with power coming from wall and into mic then out of mic and into camera. Will the POE cameras "back-power" the mic? Will the 12v dc in from the camera powered if the camera is powered by POE instead? There's a comment on that amazon page that seems to say it is but another comment where someone couldn't get it powered.

No, it is not designed that way and you will probably blow out the camera board. Maybe not immediately, maybe a few days from now or next week or next month. Just not worth as there are other ways.

The camera is designed to accept power from either the ethernet cable or the 12v cable, but not provide power from one to the other.

Now if you take a reading on the 12v, you will see some voltage (most see like 11.5v or so), but what you're reading is voltage leaking through the diode that is there to prevent drawing power from that connector and would fail under load. The PoE converter in the camera is designed to support the camera only and no external devices.

We have seen a few guys that have opened up a camera and bypassed things to get 12VDC out on that connector, but I would not suggest doing that and risk overloading and ultimately blowing the PoE board in the camera and then you are stuck with a bad camera.

Better to use a splitter and "Y" cable or run a separate cable.


 
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Yeah...I won't be opening up the cameras and bypassing anything. The POE splitter looks good to me on a couple of cameras in key locations. And I think the POE splitter with a dc power splitter may be the answer to another issue. I plan to put up an IR light over my driveway (Tendelux DI20, 12v 2a). I would guess I could split POE into ethernet and dc then split the dc to send one to the camera and the other to the light. It would get its power from a 4 port 65W PoE Switch. There would be 3 other non-ptz cameras on that switch as well so I'd suspect power wouldn't be an issue.
 
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I posted this over in the 180 thread, but since they are both newer cameras on the new Web GUI, it might be part of the issue for some people:


24 hours on a TP-Link POE+ injector and no problems (no NO SIGNAL in BI)

6 hours on BV Tech 4-port 65W POE+ switch with 2 other cameras - 22 No Signals

6 hours on YuanLey 11 port 120W POE+ switch with 6 other cameras - 24 No Signals

6 hours on Steameo 8 port 120W POE+ switch with 5 other cameras - 11 No Signals

The BV Tech, YuanLey, and Steameo are all budget POE+ switches that most will say stay away with, but if I didn't run it close to power budget and kept some open ports, they would actually do okay. But adding this camera caused issues, even if I took a camera off.

So the moral of the story is that while the budget POE switches may work for some cameras, I think some of these newer cams use more power/different power demands than some of the other cameras and as such the budget switches just have a difficult time even though according to the POE switch spec it could handle it.
 
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Yeah...I won't be opening up the cameras and bypassing anything. The POE splitter looks good to me on a couple of cameras in key locations. And I think the POE splitter with a dc power splitter may be the answer to another issue. I plan to put up an IR light over my driveway (Tendelux DI20, 12v 2a). I would guess I could split POE into ethernet and dc then split the dc to send one to the camera and the other to the light. It would get its power from a 4 port 65W PoE Switch. There would be 3 other non-ptz cameras on that switch as well so I'd suspect power wouldn't be an issue.

This is exactly what I do when I installed my IR illuminators. Split the POE into signal and 12v then split the 12v between the camera and the IR.

Only thing to be aware of, but doesn't apply in the majority of the situations, is the combined draw (in watts) of the camera and IR. I have 10w IRs and each camera is max 5w with their own IR on.
 
This is exactly what I do when I installed my IR illuminators. Split the POE into signal and 12v then split the 12v between the camera and the IR.

Only thing to be aware of, but doesn't apply in the majority of the situations, is the combined draw (in watts) of the camera and IR. I have 10w IRs and each camera is max 5w with their own IR on.

20W IR. That leaves an average of 11W per camera.
 
My experiences as it relates to your comments:

2. That has not been my experience. Did you even open it up in anything other than IE? I have seen that happen if a camera is opened in a different browser.

4. I agree the sliders are cumbersome. If you click on the timeline, the actual start and stop time to the second pops up and I manually type those in so that I don't experience the gaps.

I am buying and using these cameras for the video. The audio is just a bonus. It isn't the best but it does do its job. I have added this external mic to a few critical cameras to get better audio or add a mic to a non-audio camera.


It could just be a different batch. It works much better now I've off loaded everything to BI apart from trip wires. However, it shouldn't be necessary to do this. Even now, settings sometimes change eg encoding and image.

Even Andy can't explain the Log entries. I'm unsure if he's in contact with Dahua about this.

Thatnks for the mic link. How do you mount this to your turrets, as they say non waterproof and turret cameras are round whereas the mic appears long and thin and more suited to mounting on a bullet camera. I also see Dahua do a flat round mic. Anyone have any experience of these?
 
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Another issue Dahua might want to consider is focus distance. I would have bought a 4K-T, but it's focus distance is too far out. I am aware that a large lens ( 1/f=1.0 iirc) leads to a shallow depth of field. Perhaps the camera would benefit from the ability (even manually) to focus it in a nearer region if it is installed with such a fov. As it is, the best lit regions are close to my house yet the camera can't focus in them. Having 4 K is wasted, if the pic is then blurred.
 
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So I'm thinking about getting the 3.6mm version of this camera. I have a 2MP pixel cam I need to replace that records a lighted sidewalk and I'm thinking this would be a major upgrade over that camera. Have most of the early bugs from the July launch been fixed yet? What about close focus distance of the 3.6mm? Is it accurate to say it's at the stated specs of 16'?

I could do the tried and true 5442 instead but was really hoping to take advantage of a larger sensor.
 
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My focal distance appears to be around 16 feet, maybe slightly more. I can get a colour picture at night with a 5w led wall light and 8ms shutter and gain @ 50. A little more light might be better, but the 5w is adequate. The camera adapts very quickly to light changes such as sensor lights coming on. As for reliability, I can't comment. I have had teething issues with both of mine. Juries still out on the cause.