If the product or its documentation doesn't lead you to do the right thing I don't think I would call it user "error". The documentation for these cameras is not great. The operation manual is more of a reference on how to do something but not why. It doesn't say that the IVS Global Setup can be a requirement for IVS to work correctly and it lacks any form or troubleshooting information. It's really only through advice from people like you that these things are made known. Or maybe I'm just not reading the correct documentation?
While I agree with you on that, we are not the user that Dahua and Hikvision is targeting. They have made a business decision to target the professional installers and authorized distributors of these cameras. I suspect many of them have been trained on all the settings or have installed enough to know what to do. Call either company up and they will tell you to talk to the vendor you purchased from.
Contrast that with consumer grade stuff sold at the big box stores. You can call a Night Owl or Arlo or Reolink or Lorex or
Amcrest and speak to a representative (now whether they can help you or not is another story), but they will not tell you to talk to Best Buy where you purchased it...
We are just fortunate enough to be able to get our hands on these. Dahua
wiki that you can found online can be helpful in many instances.
Here is there wiki on global setup:
DahuaWiki
Did you look for this before you complained about the camera? Did you come here for advice before you threw the towel in on the camera?
Because we are not their target audience is why sites like this are so valuable.
I will take less documentation for better cameras and rely on sites like this over consumer grade junk at a big box store all day long....
I wonder how many returns the Andy's of the world get because someone doesn't understand the camera and returns a perfectly good camera...
