Well I just wanted to share some insight about the new firmware.
1. Upon first login, you are presented with a basic software licensing terms and conditions page that you have to agree to first before you can login.
- It makes a few disclaimers about the camera being able to phone home to check for updates and I they also make claims that your email will not be shared with any third parties.
- When signing up, it takes you to a walk through to set up EZ-IP and also your email if you wish to reset your password via email.
- You can uncheck these options and skip them (a nice feature to allow you some privacy in your camera setup.)
- The optimized zoom is a solid feature and I am honestly happy to have to on this camera. I've been flip-flopping through the september firmware and a firmware from june with the help of Frank (Thank you Frank) and I've been torn because Franks firmware handled tracking better than the September firmware but it also had a few bugs like failing to return to home after tracking sometimes.
- I don't know if I'm still high on the firmware giddy's or if it's a placebo but auto tracking seems to have improved...This is due to two things i'm noticing (not sure if this was present in other firmwares)
- Auto tracking is able to maintain focus better because the zooming function maintains better focus. Previous firmwares would lose tracking as the camera got blurry for a second.
- Auto tracking is able to zoom and move the camera at the same time. It felt like previous firmwares would do one or the other. (I think the camera lost focus during zooms and this was why it didn't pan and tilt during the zoom function, again possibly a placebo effect)
I have only had it installed for about an hour but so far I am confident I plan to keep this as my primary firmware.
Only issue I have is the email portion. I opted to not enter my email (Thank you for giving us the option), I tried to do a forget password action but it scolded me for not having my email entered.
But I was wondering, does this email reside on the camera or does it phone home. Who does the email reset? Dahua? or the Camera?, what if you don't have SMTP enabled? etc...
I'm wondering if that function means dahua can initiate the password change when you click that link since they talk about not sharing your email with any third parties. I have too much network rules in place to drop my camera out of the secured zone for me to test that function. If anyone else wants to take a swing at it please let us know!
Update: Three hours into usage. I've been watching the camera and generally it's been a better experience as a whole. I've discovered however that when zoomed in to distant objects with horizontal planes (lots of floors on a building, fence lines etc) it has a "focus flutter" type effect where it refocuses every second or two, the flutter is very minute but it's noticeable)