Please recommend a setup (with house plan attached)

[2JZGTE]

Hi all,

I'm a total noob at this and looking for help. I need 5 cameras (4 outside and 1 inside the garage), and I'm all wired with Cat6, so that's not an issue. I'm looking for help finding the right hardware.

The lot is 104ft x 58 ft and it's on a corner of 2 streets (to the upper and right sides). The lower side is the backyard and the left side is a narrow path between my neighbor and I. The house is a 40ft x 40ft square.

There is a driveway on the right side and the main stairs are on the upper side.

The green triangles are what I think I need to cover with the camera angles. There is one camera inside which I didn't picture here.

I hope I made it clear enough... I'm not looking for anything expensive, I really want a plug-and-play solution because I'm not good with programming or networking. I wanted to go the Costco way but you guys discouraged me from doing so

Thoughts? Opinions?
Thanks.

 

[aristobrat]

I think your setup is pretty good if you're trying to get a general overview of what's going on around your house.

For the stairs and driveway, I'm not sure you'd get much detail with the cameras being 20/30 feet back. I think you'd be able to see that there was someone at your door/in your driveway, but if you didn't already know who it was, I'm not sure there'd be enough detail there to truly identify someone.

You can get cameras with more of a zoomed lens (i.e. 6mm) to help solve that problem, but that also narrows the field-of-view, so I don't think a camera with a zoomed lens will grab as much of the angle in their shot as you want. i.e. if you put a 6mm camera looking at your driveway, it'd probably only get 1/2 of the yard before the driveway in the frame, not everything you have sketched out.

If you haven't already, play around some with Camera Calculator / Design Software

It'll let you pick a specific camera (or you can just fill in camera specs), then you can add the camera to the Google Maps image below. If your house pulls up on Google maps, you can drag the camera to a specific spot on your house, then drag the little dude to a spot (say, middle of your driveway), and it'll show you what the image quality should be. Even if your house doesn't pull up, you can still get an idea of what the image quality of a camera will be XX feet away.

For example, if you put a camera at the top right of your house looking down at your driveway, and you got a 2MP camera with a 3.66mm lens on it, at 30.5ft away, someone in your driveway would likely look like this:



Now, if you could put another camera on the bottom right of your house looking up at the driveway (I'm guessing 10.5 feet away), someone in it would likely look like this, which is a big difference in image quality.



If you want cameras that do well at night, look in the Dahua sub-forum here for the Starlight models. You'll want turrets or bullets for outside, domes can be a PITA (IR can reflect back from the dome and cause image issues, spiders like to build webs on them, the dome can fade from direct sunlight, etc).

 

[2JZGTE]

Very informative post, thanks. I saw this tool before but never knew how to use it. I appreciate that you took the time to illustrate with examples. Now to find the right models.