zm versus dvr system
zm versus dvr system
My home zm installation got hit by lightning and fried all the cams, my bluecherry card and the ethernet port on the mb. Insurance is paying for it but while I was looking for new cams I saw this... http://www.amazon.com/Defender-SN301-8C ... ity+camera and I wondered how well these things work in comparison to zm. I'm not hung up on that certain item but am curious about that type of device.
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intelligen
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Sun Jul 14, 2013 2:06 am
Re: zm versus dvr system
The Defender SN301 is a piece of crap, as are most of the cheap systems. I've tried Defender, Swann, and some off-brand build-your-own "premium system" from closeoutcctv and they're all junk. Stick with ZoneMinder or some other reputable software-based system.
I've tried several commercial bundles and they were all awful:
The Defender system's video quality was terrible and it can only record D1 resolution at 60 FPS across all 8 cameras (7.5 FPS average). In other words, it can only record 30 FPS on one camera at a time, or 14 FPS on up to 4 cameras with the other 4 cameras only recording 1 FPS. It also rebooted randomly and beeped 5 or 6 times every time it rebooted, making me think the video signal was lost or the hard drive had failed (as indicated in the user manual).
The Swann system was a little better but the video quality was still horrible, and even though it claimed 600 TVL, it could still only record D1 resolution (480 TVL). Motion detection was impossible to tune; it detected motion a lot of the time when nothing was going on--I think it was because the poor-quality video signals coming from the cameras are very noisy. The cameras also made a loud clunk every time the IR cut-off filter was activated, and at certain times of day they just kept switching back and forth between night mode and day mode.
Sadly, the closeoutcctv ones were the worst of the bunch; the first one I tried rebooted every time an alarm was triggered if I had e-mail alerts enabled. The second closeoutcctv system's motion detection configuration didn't work. On both closeoutcctv systems, the remote viewer was buggy, video could only be downloaded in real-time via the Internet Explorer ActiveX control, and the Windows file sharing/samba interface didn't work at all.
I've tried several commercial bundles and they were all awful:
The Defender system's video quality was terrible and it can only record D1 resolution at 60 FPS across all 8 cameras (7.5 FPS average). In other words, it can only record 30 FPS on one camera at a time, or 14 FPS on up to 4 cameras with the other 4 cameras only recording 1 FPS. It also rebooted randomly and beeped 5 or 6 times every time it rebooted, making me think the video signal was lost or the hard drive had failed (as indicated in the user manual).
The Swann system was a little better but the video quality was still horrible, and even though it claimed 600 TVL, it could still only record D1 resolution (480 TVL). Motion detection was impossible to tune; it detected motion a lot of the time when nothing was going on--I think it was because the poor-quality video signals coming from the cameras are very noisy. The cameras also made a loud clunk every time the IR cut-off filter was activated, and at certain times of day they just kept switching back and forth between night mode and day mode.
Sadly, the closeoutcctv ones were the worst of the bunch; the first one I tried rebooted every time an alarm was triggered if I had e-mail alerts enabled. The second closeoutcctv system's motion detection configuration didn't work. On both closeoutcctv systems, the remote viewer was buggy, video could only be downloaded in real-time via the Internet Explorer ActiveX control, and the Windows file sharing/samba interface didn't work at all.