Affordable night vision cams for Synology setup?

[sdmark]

After a recent 4am car burglary, I'm motivated to replace the 2016 EzViz Sam's Club 3MP DVR special with a better system.

I have a Synology DS1520+ with 3.5TB set aside for surveillance, and I've been planning to use that for 3-4 outdoor cams (yes even if I have to buy a couple camera licenses).

I'm testing two Amcrest cameras, an IP5MP-T1179EW and an IP8M-T2599EW. They seem pretty good especially at $50 and $77, but after reading many posts here ("chase sensor size, not MP" and "8MP doesn't see IR"), I wonder if I should get something lower-res with better night vision. I like turret, would consider bullet. I don't feel varifocal or PTZ is worth the extra expense, since the system will likely be unattended when I most need it. Don't see a great need for AI either--I'll record 24/7, so at best it would just eliminate swaying trees from the motion-detection bars during playback. I was hoping to be under $100 per cam but $150ish might be worth it.

I see lots of recommendations here, as recently as yesterday, for cameras from EmpireTech, Loryta, and WizKam, none of which are supported by Synology. Maybe I could tell Synology it's the Dahua equivalent and get away with one of those. Any recommendations for Amcrest or Hikvision? One thread here comments on the Amcrest IP8M-2597EB-28MM with a 1/1.8" sensor for $125 but it's out of stock and the white models are not on the Amcrest site at all, so it may be discontinued.

BTW if someone wants to argue that I should forget Synology, buy BlueIris, and used this old Lenovo Tiny computer I had planned to set up as the Synology monitoring computer, I'll listen .

Thanks for all the help,

Mark

 

[wittaj]

Yes those cameras by empiretech and Loryta are Dahua OEM and will work with your system. And they would be better choices than the budge cams you are looking at now.

 

[KCXLT]

I've got a few IPC-T5442 and a IPC-T2231T that I got from Andy and they work fine on Synology Surveillance Station.

 

[sdmark]

Thanks. @KCXLT, what do you configure in Synology as the model for the T5442?

 

[KCXLT]

I use Dahua as the Brand and [Generic Dahua] as the model. Everything works such as IVS, alerts come through the DS Cam app. I've also got one of the new 4K Bullets and it runs ok too, although SS won't let me set the Bitrate above 8192.

 

[ipcamuser11]

Any ONVIF compatible camera can work on Synology Surveillance Station, just choose ONVIF when you set them up

 

[sdmark]

I've got a couple of the 5442 cameras now. I set them up as Dahua N44CG53 in Synology, which looked close (N45DJ62 is also not supported by Synology). I have hit one snag: the 3.6mm camera supports 704x480 as a substream resolution, which works with the N44CG53 configuration. However the 2.8mm camera does NOT support that resolution, instead offering 704x576. When setting up the the 2.8mm camera, I copied the Synology config from the 3.6mm camera to the 2.8mm camera, but Synology could not update the camera configuration and simply disconnected the camera. I got it back online for now by dropping back to 640x480 for the substream.

So that was instructive about how Synology interacts with cameras and why supported cameras would make things easier--it knows what resolutions the camera supports, whether it supports audio, etc. (It seems like there should be protocols in ONVIF for discovering all of that, but maybe there aren't.)