Thanks for the recommendation of
Uniview and Hanwha. Where do folks buy those brands and find product reviews? The
Uniview section of the forum here looks pretty quiet.
Aye, an' there's the rub.
One advantage to Hik and Dahua is their popularity here on IPCT. So you can get a pretty good idea of what you're buying beforehand. (Plus, let us not forget, Andy's support and his apparent ability to get those manufacturers to [sometimes?] fix stuff.) These other brands? Lacking product performance coverage: They're a craps shoot.
Example: I bought a pair of Hanwha cams off a fellow forum member.
May have turned out to have been money wasted. They're great cameras. Nicer than the Dahua cams I have in many respects. Only one problem: In the environment in which I'm placing them there's not enough light to persuade them to transition from B&W into color. It's not that there's not more than enough light to support a good, clear image in color. If I force them into color, then set them back to auto, they'll stay in color as long as the lights stay on. Once the lights go out and they go into B&W, there they stay--even if I artificially raise the light level to
well above the level that keeps them in color once forced.
My seller is still working with me on it, but I fear these may be destined for the electronics scrap heap
Let me be clear: I'm not blaming the seller. Or even Hanwha. (Though I can't imagine what the latter's engineers were thinking, setting the color/B&W transition hysteresis so bloody wide on these things.) I suspect the cams were designed for business/commercial settings, where the lighting is generally
much brighter than in most residential settings. My point is: Had there been reviews, had there been user experiences posted here--or anywhere, I might have known what to expect and avoided them.
As for Reolink: They're cheap cams, even compared to Hik and Dahua,
but... While its image quality ain't that great, that stupid little $85 Reolink PTZ cam I bought four years ago just keeps on truckin'. If we can't get those Hanwha cams to play nice, I'll end up putting it back. At least it knows how to switch back into color
That combined with the relatively small sensors the "off brands" offer and they ain't so hot. Amcrest, Lorex and a bunch of others are usually Dahua or Hikvision rebrands and stripped of features and sometimes even hardware to make them lower priced.
