Apparently even private sales are about to be federal crimes. White label rebrands should start disappearing in January. Empiretech, the only real Dahua clone that isn’t dumbed down, will probably be the first to go. Next will be the low-end rebrand crap gear that “pros” install like LTS, Lorex, etc.

I’m guessing Annke and Amcrest will just source elsewhere. eBay has already banned Dahua and Hik electronics. Searches just show mounting hardware.

I didn’t realize how big of a deal this was before getting my hands on my first decent Dahua gear last week. Holy crap it is nearly infinitely better than anything I’ve seen. Full control over every little detail possible down to the curves, shutter speed curves, every stream imaginable, layered streaming, clean API, any bitrate you want, frame rates in increments of 1.. Icing on the cake is that you can turn off all “chatter.” I had a backyard cam deep in a covered patio overlooking a bright arse pool. No problem for the Dahua. Dark patio and bright pool are evenly lit in the footage.

You used to get all this for around $200 per 2k camera but that’s about to be $500+ in January, or more realistically, just not available to Americans at all because nobody has all those features, not even Axis.

This post was edited on 12/10/25 at 10:53 pm

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Posted by Korkstand

Member since Nov 2003

29046 posts

Posted on 12/15/25 at 10:52 am to Dallaswho

Uniview (UNV) is I think the third largest white label Chinese camera manufacturer, and they avoided most of the trouble longer than dahua and hik. Are they getting tangled up in it as well?

quote:
I’m guessing Annke and Amcrest will just source elsewhere.

From who? Hanwha? Vivotek? I think any way we slice it price/performance is going to 2-3X.

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Posted by Korkstand

Member since Nov 2003

29046 posts

Posted on 12/15/25 at 11:03 am to Dallaswho

quote:
I didn’t realize how big of a deal this was before getting my hands on my first decent Dahua gear last week. Holy crap it is nearly infinitely better than anything I’ve seen. Full control over every little detail possible down to the curves, shutter speed curves, every stream imaginable, layered streaming, clean API, any bitrate you want, frame rates in increments of 1.. Icing on the cake is that you can turn off all “chatter.”

Ubiquiti doesn't expose these "nitty gritty" settings, hiding most of it behind friendlier settings, but you can still tune for most environments. The biggest knocks on Ubiquiti have been price/performance and the lack of ONVIF compliance. They have recently allowed ONVIF cams into their system with some caveats, but it doesn't go the other way and you still can't use their cams with an ONVIF system. But they do have a powerful alarm system with an API so you can integrate that way if necessary. And now it looks like suddenly Ubiquiti might be the best bang for the buck. They have started adding a 7% tariff charge on most of their camera gear, and I appreciate that they itemize that.

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Posted by Dallaswho

Texas

Member since Dec 2023

3403 posts

Posted on 12/15/25 at 4:52 pm to Korkstand

UNV is not affected other than regular tariffs but they have been busy replacing Dahua and Hik as suppliers for American brands since the 2022 ban and they’ve already doubled or tripled in price.

All the recent activity stems from an (unprecedented?) October decision for revocation of previously approved devices. Dahua just announced completely leaving the USA as of 1-Jan.

You can still get the Empiretech Andy/Dahua T54IR-AS on Amazon for $160 or $230 for 4k but hard telling for how long.

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