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.