Home camera recommendations?

I've got some Amcrest POE cameras going to my Milestone NVR hosted on a VM. Recordings get stored on my NAS and you can view live footage on mobile

Edit: It's not very cheap to setup, though, considering you need a POE switch, PC to run XProtect, POE cameras, and a hard drive to store footage

I've been down the doorbell camera, sams/costco camera package route and eventually settled on individual POE cameras running Blue Iris on an old PC. The beauty of the system is you are not limited when you choose to add more cameras. You can run different brands, high end cameras along side $50 cameras as well as PTZ's. Not for everyone, but once you add 2 cameras, you'll want 17. If you are just looking for something to watch your front porch, then this is a little overkill.

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Also look at Eufy

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Nahhhhhhh

Why to never go with Eufy products

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Ubiquity is the way. Closed network you can access anywhere with the app. I have the doorbell cam and 3 bullet cameras. Love it!

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Surveillance installer pros will tell you that Ubiquiti cameras are shite, but as a surveillance installer semi-pro I will tell you that every other camera app is shite compared to Ubiquiti's. Yes, the Chinese brands give you better video quality per dollar, but past a certain point more pixels are not helpful, and what really matters to most people is how easy it is to review footage and see what happened. Nothing I've found comes close to Ubiquiti here, at least not within typical residential budgets.

If you want wired Ethernet cables and don't mind comparatively higher prices, installation and setup work, plus desire top of the line system management and capabilities with cameras that have the ability to read license plate numbers and have facial videos good enough for court then go with Ubiquity.

If you want comparatively lower price, feature rich, non subscription WiFi continuous recording cameras with wired power, then check out EZVIZ cameras. They have a great DB1C doorbell cam plus I like all of my EZVIZ cams better than my Wyze V3 and ReoLink cams. The app is great and their cams have AI features with no subscription. I can watch 4 cameras live at a time, the motion detection is customizable to the pixel, and the picture is plenty good enough to know what is going on around your house and property.

Note that the EZVIZ cameras do record to MicroSD cards and that is an issue for some people but I actually prefer it over cloud uploads which I don't want to pay for. Also with these cams, make sure you also have a Mesh WiFi or similar so that you have excellent Wifi around the perimeter of your house, plus if your house is really old such that doorbell voltage measures less than 12v at the doorbell you will have to upgrade your doorbell transformer.

You should also consider the amount of work required to run power vs POE Ethernet cables and if you desire a more professional installation. My installation is far from professional but it works for me. As an example, for some of my outdoor cameras I installed some deep waterproof AC outlet covers on my outside outlets and ran outdoor extension cords with water proof surge protected multi outlet strips mounted inside waterproof boxes that house my camera power connections plus remote controlled timers for LED spot/flood light and rope lights that collectively light up the perimeter of the house at night. That was all very easy to install for relatively low price, but many would criticize the security of the system. It works for me.

We live in the country on wooded acerage. I have plenty of cameras. The waterproof boxes are hidden with shrubs, the cables are covered with pine straw and route up the walls behind gutters so they are not readily seen. If someone wanted to try and disable all of my AI cameras that instantly send alarms when they detect a human, they are sure to not have enough time if I am at home. If I'm away I bet they would miss some or most of my camouflaged completely wireless solar powered WiFi Reolink PTZ cameras mounted out of reach on trees away from the house. Although they could disable the power cables from the ground on most (but not all) of the wired cameras, they'll need a ladder to get to any of the cameras on my property and I would already be aware.

We have a ring doorbell and all of our floodlights are the ring floodlight cams. They're awesome and incredibly easy to set up.

Reolink PoE cameras. They are best value according to some folks on YouTube who do testing. My 5 cameras and NvR cost about $800 and they’ve worked great


Is your attic walkable or do you have to belly crawl? If you can walk your attic, I’d install PoE cameras. It’s the best option by far, but requires a bit of work.

And with Reolink you can add whatever specialty cameras you may want to a package. Depending on your needs.

You can also run just cameras and manage them from a computer running the client, with ability to save footage to network storage. The nvr makes it easy to just add the nvr to mobile app and have all cameras accessible from there. Without nvr, you have to add/configure each camera individually

Reolink is where it's at. I have the POE PTZ and door bell. I'll probably add one more for my back patio in the future.