Starting fresh with a camera system. Ring?

Personally I avoid cameras that record to the cloud only like the plague. That adds a whole lot of points of failure between the camera and the storage. They have their place, but I categorize these as monitoring systems rather than security. Maybe that's all you want though.

AFAIK there is no single manufacturer that sells cameras, light switches, locks, plus more as an "all in one" solution. Maybe the closest you'll get is with Wyze's product lineup, but I can't vouch for the quality of their gear or how well they play with other stuff.

You will probably end up piecing together a solution with products from different manufacturers, and the toughest decision ends up being which control system you want to buy into. There are high end systems like Control4/Savant/Crestron, but I don't have any experience with them and I probably wouldn't buy into such an expensive system anyway. A lot of people obviously just go the Amazon/Google route to control all their stuff. Personally I like getting my hands dirty with Home Assistant because that gives you the most control and most things happen locally (avoids adding points of failure), but of course the learning curve is the highest.



Do you have an "ecosystem" preference?

I was always told "don't put all of your eggs in one basket" when dealing with home security/cameras.

I currently have a Ring Doorbell, SimpliSafe alarm system with one camera inside, and 2 exterior Zumimall cameras.

Here's what I do:

- PoE switch
- AXIS IP cameras (use anything that is allowed in federal facilities)
- Synology NAS with extra surveillance station licenses
- PfSense firewall to lock all my video and NAS shite down
- setup near instant backups to object storage in the cloud
- set up alerts and whatnot

It's been a solid setup.

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UniFi Protect

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I certainly am enjoying my setup. I’d say it was worth the high price tag, though my Protect app seems somewhat buggy/crashy compared to the browser.



ETA- anyone who I have shown video to has been impressed with the picture quality.

My ring doorbell got hacked and the swat team broke my door down in the middle of the night. Don’t get a ring

Blink

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I took the advice that Korkstand mentioned about a year ago on my new build and bought a Lorex system.

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Yikes. China thanks you for your family's early participation in the social credit monitoring system.