For starters, no problems so far....but its a bit scary to see nearly 1/4 of referb products on the market. After checking back on the product to see how others rated it, it also dropped about a hundo...SOB!
back to the product.....
So far its been a pretty neat toy. took me about a month to crawl through the attic, figure out how to place the cameras in non-obvious places, and to mount the monitor on the wall.
Install: really easy for DIY's. a dummy couldn't screw it up. only issue was the lack of cord. 60ft will not wrap around the attic from one end of my house to the other. I was able to purchase anohter for 40ish and connect it to another 60ft wire with everything working ok.
*one camera was less than 5ft away from where the monitor was. Would have been nice to find shorter length wires to make me feel better by not wasting the other 50ft and a few extra bucks.
Cams: I don't have any other comparison since this is my first and only for personal use. The quality seems decent. The system can hold a 'max' frame rate that is a 'give and take' method (meaning if you had a front door camera that you want to focus on, the others can be 'downgraded' for compensation.) Don't expect a facial recognition after 10ft...but i can tell which one of my friends were coming up to my house during testing.
During night time use, its basically a black and white type of feed with a green haze on objects. its not very detailed, but it'll give you a general picture of what's going on and who's doing it. The infra-red lights kick on at dusk and somewhat low lights. this really sucks if you are trying to conceal the cameras because the 20red lights around the camera lens are really obvious when looked directly at. I snuck most of my cameras under the eves of the roof, which limited the area of view, but would catch a good glimpse of un-knowers walking by. One camera was placed next to a motion censored light, so the camera will kick into color mode when somebody comes to the door for color definition.
Monitor: pretty neato. it has a on/off is a button less touch spot that i overlooked for awhile. it comes with a wireless remote that will do basic stuff, but the USB mouse makes any operation MUCH easier.
System thoughts: A word of warning, video taped sections can't be deleted!!! you must re-set the system to clear it all off, i guess its a good feature for small biz owners wanting to keep overall tabs on a place. It has a password protected access...but anybody with a brain could reach in the back and click the off button. I bought the 1TB version which looks like it will hold 2 years of info......jeebus! Looking back on my purchase I don't think anybody will have a need for that much time storage.
it has the option to save clips of sessions you want to store on a USB(never tried it yet)
does not have a DVi connection (only the blue connection) sucks for somebody wanting to double it as a monitor with the newer connections.
Fun notes: I have a 350VA back-up battery surge protector I originally purchased for my computer (but ended up buying a faster laptop that wont need it) and now use the back up battery for the security camera system only. Under daylight operations +1 one camera in the garage using the IF night lights. I was able to run 4 cameras for a hour! take that sneeky burglars trying to kill the power to potentially steal my shiznat!!! (hopefully they can't tract my amazon account to my address n read this) my wireless router is a juice sucker, so im guessing if i ever used the battery+internet modem...it might last 20min.
Features I plan on trying:
-syncing it somehow to an iphone
-connect Cable TV to it so i can show others its just a tv
-sync it to a backup to a hidden NAS, just n case a thief wants to steal the 'monitor' ;)
3 mionths later....
-1 TB will only supply 3 weeks of 24hr recording. LAME! once it fills up you have the option to overwite old data...or just stop working.
So it was time to set up motion sensor, A+ for these settings. The DVR technically 'always records', but once motion is detected it will 'save the record' from 1min to 5seconds (up to your decision) before the motion was triggered, just in case it may have missed something before the camera noticed something. i am now on 3 months of tid bit recordings,
-you can set up the motion detection area so trees blowing in the wind won't 'trigger' it's motion.
-the mount I bought got in the way of some vid cam connections when screwed in. Took me about 10min to grind out a bid enough chunk with a bench grinder. not a hard task, but still annoying.
One of the cameras had a 1/4 section of IF lights go out, dont know if its covered per camera...but Samsung better honor a one camera return over the whole system replacement( or some crazy old man fist shaking will happen). Hope the 'double' extension cord was not a factor since the others are still working fine
my attempt of running cable tv failed because of the odd cable connection in the back, i got ticked and pushed that project off for now. The VGA connection works, but does not have any input for speakers. Y U No easy to make TV!!!!!!!!!!!
it has some 'alarm' input where it will hold a small wire per camera. I have no clue what this does. possibly some connection device that will blink a light when motion is detected??? anybody know anything about these?
I tried connecting it to the internet, that failed. It appears the only way to get the update is from the system being connected online. Dang Samsung is only available during biz hours east coast time.
I still like the system overall =)
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