re: Home security cameras

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Get the Blink camera system

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Amazon will have good deals on a whole system for and probably the extra cameras, too, starting this weekend. I have had mine for over a year and no issues except batteries.

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I don't want to have to pay subscription to access recorded video.

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Amcrest doorbell here. no sub fees and works with almost any local NVR if you have one.

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Amcrest doorbell here. no sub fees and works with almost any local NVR if you have one.

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I'm a fan of Amcrest. I have a couple of their bullets and a turret. The video quality is pretty good, and for the price they are an excellent value.

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Any opinions on Reolink?

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I have one outside my house and it's fine, can't really complain for the price. It freezes for 2-3 seconds when it switches day/night, but not a dealbreaker for me.

I have installed 4 of them at another location and 2 of them died after about a year. But to be fair they were installed very near the highest point inside a metal building with no vent, so I'm pretty certain that temps reached or exceeded the max operating temp of ~130. And 2 of them are still alive after 3-4 years, so take that for what it's worth.

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Also, what are your thoughts on the prepackaged NVRs vs using something like a Synology NAS?

Would you install Zoneminder on any or all of the above?

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I say use whatever works, is easiest for you, and what fits your budget. There are so many different NVRs that I wouldn't know where to begin with a recommendation other than to say look for features you might want like free remote access via app, person/vehicle "smart" notifications, things like that. Also never tried the synology stuff but I'm sure it's fine.

Personally I will probably always use Zoneminder for my own systems. It's far from the easiest to set up, it may not be the best as far as resource usage, and it's definitely not the prettiest thing...

But it just suits me and the way I do things. Being open source is my top concern, it's extremely configurable, and it is capable of things that no other software can do (at least none that I'm aware of).

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I'd add a couple of IR illuminators around the house particularly in the back yard. This is something I still may do.

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So for those with no experience with outdoor cameras, bugs LOVE the IR lights. And that means spiders LOVE building webs in front of them. So if your day/night camera has built in IR LEDs (which is basically all of them), then you WILL get bug motion all night long, and spiderwebs light up very brightly and block the view. There are two basic fixes:

1. Clean/maintain them regularly. Like weekly. Buy a pole duster so you can do it without a ladder.

2. Install independent IR flood lamps to light up the area and disable the cam's built in IR lights. This way bugs and spiderwebs aren't reflected as if you're looking at the sun. Then you can just clean the cams every few months probably.

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All of these cams have a limited field of view (slightly less than 90 deg).

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There are many wide angle ones that are >90 on up to 180 "fisheye/superwide" ones. And keep in mind that a lot of them are measured diagonally, so a 90 degree camera will probably see a little bit less than 90 degrees horizontally.

It can be tempting to use wide angle cameras all the way around because you can see everything with fewer cameras, but a single 180 degree camera covering your entire back yard will be a *LOT* less effective than two 90 degree ones. Off the top two 90 degree cameras give you twice as many pixels, but it's worse than that. The 180 degree FOV isn't just horizontal, but vertical as well, so you have half as many pixels covering twice as much area making it 4X worse, but it's worse than that. The outer edges (probably 50+% of the entire FOV) of a fisheye cam are distorted to hell, so now we're up to at least 8X worse performance vs. two 90 degree cams. And it's probably worse than that.

Wide and super-wide cameras have their applications, but you have to think about what your objective is. We are mostly interested in people, and there are basically 3 rough categories: detection, recognition, and identification.

Detection is essentially just "yep, that's a person". Maybe you can tell what they're doing as well, but not always. The majority of what a wide angle cam sees is just detection area, so you can tell that someone did something.

Recognition is where you can tell who the person is because you are familiar with them.

Identification is when a completely unknown person can be identified/matched with an image that you have captured.


These boundaries are obviously not well-defined because there are lots of factors in play, but the moral of the story is a standard view camera will actually have a larger identification area than a wide angle camera, and maybe even a larger recognition area. So that's the trade-off for covering a wider detection area.

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Do you have the doorbell?

I don't want to have to pay subscription to access recorded video.

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the doorbell is free as well per month