Current (2014) good CCTV cameras - wifi

[Tim Watts]

Anyone bought one recently? It's such a changeable market - hence the posting here...

I'm after a couple of home that I can mount under the soffits - we've been having pikies at work in the village lately on an ongoing basis.

Most important is excellent night vision - preferable without relying on IR LEDs - but this is OK if they actually work over a 10m range.

Ebay chinese or known makes? At work I would buy Axis, but then I wouldn't be paying! Any good experiences of specific items would be useful :)

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My house has a lot of access points and a lot of blind spots so I'm going to need either a couple of PZR (pan, zoom, rotate) motorised ones on the corners of the house or I'll probably need 4-6 much cheaper fixed units.

Wifi would be best - as I have the option to position one or two remotely with a small lead-acid battery and I have power everywhere but not networking (yet).

My soffits are fairly sheltered - I could almost get away with no protection, but are there any inexpensive domes anyone has had good results with? Need not be industrial and vandal resistant - just need to keep blowing drizzle off.

Cheers - Tim

[Bob H]

I initially bought 2 Y-cam bullet cameras which can be wi-fi, but I use poe instead as it's more reliable here. Then later, I bought 2 Lilin bullet cameras. Neither of them were what I call cheap, as I wanted reliability along with night vision etc.

[Tim Watts]

Thanks Bob - they look really rather tasty... 100-200 is Ok if I could get the coverage with 2-3

[Bob Eager]

Look as if they only work with Internet Explorer. May not be a problem for you, though.

[spuorgelgoog]

PZT (pan zoom tilt) are near-useless unless you are watching them continuously and can manually move them to the required direction. For unattended recording to be viewed later multiple fixed cameras are often more useful.

Owain

[JimK]

/ PZT (pan zoom tilt) are near-useless unless you are watching them continuously and can manually move them to the required direction. For unattended recording to be viewed later multiple fixed cameras are often more useful.

Owain /q

Some can be programmed to 'patrol' an area by panning continuously, or when triggered by another input (eg pir) pan &or zoom to a preset position for a length of time.

But I favour fixed cameras too, less to go wrong.

Mount 1 or 2 to get some good ID headshots of visitors, use the others to show the general activities.

Jim K

[Bob H]

Eh? They work with FF just fine. They are IP cameras and can be configured to take x amount of pictures at a given part of the day or night. Then you can look at the said pics with any picture viewing software as they are jpgs.

[JimK]

/ Eh? They work with FF just fine. They are IP cameras and can be configured to take x amount of pictures at a given part of the day or night. Then you can look at the said pics with any picture viewing software as they are jpgs/q

Mmm some (usually old/cheap) need Active X to setup some features

Jim K

[Bob Eager]

The manual specifically says 'ActiveX'. Great if that isn't true though as they look quite good.

[Tim Watts]

That's not totally true - 10 years or so ago, I had access to some Axis cameras at work.

I found you could program (manually) 8 set points into them (sets of pan, zoom, focus and tilt).

I discovered there was a simple URL you could "HTTP GET" that would advance to a certain set point from the 1-8.

So I wrote a perl script that did that, grabbed an image, watermarked with with a time stamp and stored it on a server. Rinse and repeat.

The motor limitation dictated we could go round positions 1-8 in a 40 second cycle - but that was a lot cheaper than 8 cameras.

It was also good enough to watch what the thieves were doing when they nicked some computers.

Granted it makes it harder to do motion detection or to see in detail what someone is doing if they are quick - but it's a trade off...

[Tim Watts]

Hmm - I just noticed that...

Who has "IE only" these days???

[Tim Watts]

ActiveX is dead isn't it? Or is that Fortran? I forget....

[Bob H]

Well I bought 2 Y-Cams and 2 Lilin's and have been very pleased with what they can capture. They work for me and I can view both pictures and videos no problem. If other people reckon there might be a problem because it has to have this or it doesn't have that, well don't buy them then, look for something else that fits in with whet you only have.

[JimK]

/Well I bought 2 Y-Cams and 2 Lilin's and have been very pleased with what they can capture. They work for me and I can view both pictures and videos no problem. If other people reckon there might be a problem because it has to have this or it doesn't have that, well don't buy them then, look for something else that fits in with whet you only have. /q

Thanks for the advice.

Jim K

[Bill]

I am totally confused by this with the cheap cameras with which I'm currently on the first rung of the learning curve. Tenvis says it should only work with IE, but seems to do everything - pan, etc in other browsers. You choose the non-active-x mode. It seems to have auto IR lights, so no control. Same with the Foscam, except you choose "Push Mode". It has switcheable IR, which can be controlled in PaleMoon.

Both cams can be viewed and controlled by the Android apps I've tried.

These are just basic indoor cameras that had wpa security (the very cheap ones don't). I'm very impressed so far. Video quality seems adequate, IR range is OK indoors, but I haven't measured anything.

Both seem to have forums and presence online, but are very Chinese, as was the price (£24 for the Tenvis).

[tony sayer]

I haven't tried them as yet but I have heard good things re these.

I don't think they have built in IR as that unless someone's facing the cam seems pretty useless most of the time if you need IR then get a decent IR lamp..

[JimK]

/ I don't think they have built in IR as that unless someone's facing the cam seems pretty useless most of the time if you need IR then get a decent IR lamp..

[Bob H]

If you want better or more advice on what is ok and what isn't go here:

I have used that forum for when I was starting up with cctv

[Tim Watts]

Thanks!

[Jethro_uk]

I got two cheapish IP/WiFi Cameras from Amazon last year. Both claimed to be "IE Only" but could be used with Chrome. All the "ActiveX" does is parse the HTTP required to control the camera, and get it to deliver a streaming image.