What Security Cameras do you use?

Was wondering what security cameras people are running at their homes/businesses and what their impressions / lessons learned are from their choices?

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I was thinking the same thing recently. I started looking at ubiquiti stuff, they seem fairly well built - any comments on them also?

I have a Blink XT2 because the cloud storage is free. Battery life definitely doesn’t last 2 years as claimed, but I did get several months out of a charge (Eneloops).

In terms of connection/reliability I haven’t had any issues with it. Even after swapping out the batteries it connected right away and I had control over it without needing to do anything.

I only have one, and it’s in the living room. It’s wide enough to see the front door, living room, “dining room”, and back door. I figured this is good enough because if someone breaks in they’re probably not just going to break into the bedroom and then leave. They’re going to come into the family room, and I’ll get a direct view with how I have my camera oriented. I ain’t sticking a security camera, especially not one that uses cloud-based storage, in my bedroom. I also only have it armed when I’m not at home. When I am home, I keep it unarmed and pointed up at the ceiling.

I would like to get some for outside some day, but I’m gonna wait til I’m not living in an apartment any more. Don’t want to creep the neighbors out.

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I have a WyzeCam v2 and Pan and run them with the Xiaomi Dafang Hacks firmware. I generally trust Wyze but I don’t care enough about the extra features to let the feeds leave my network. I personally love these cameras for the bang-for-the-buck. The firmware integrates great with my Home Assistant setup and it’s packed with functionality. My only complaints are that they are Wi-Fi only and the camera quality isn’t the best. Wi-Fi is convenient but I rather not bog down my airwaves with more 2.4 GHz devices, however, a separate IoT network keeps things relatively under control. 1080p15 is not bad at all for a camera but stills tend to come out a bit smeary and blurred. It is possible this is more to do with the custom firmware. But, for $20 and $30 respectively they’re really hard to regret buying.

In all honesty I don’t have a camera system yet.
I have been eyeballing arlo.

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I’ve had previous security cameras from SuperCircuits and I’ve been happy. You might want to check out their website and take a look. (just a happy customer btw).

4 x Reolink PTZ run by Xeoma on Manjaro with storage Synology DS918+

I have a couple of amcrest cameras at the recommendation of diceman on my forum who installs them for a living. He also installs hikvision but I wasn’t digging those.

We use cameras from www.instar.com
They are affordable, thus far acceptably reliable (they have replacement parts for everything)
Their software, while a bit outdated looking on the older models, gets updates every few months still. (although the IN-5907HD still have no https for some reason)

They support rtsp and mpeg over http, and are easy to connect to zoneminder or motioneyeos for recording.

Btw, for a small - or off site - setup i can really recommend the odroid HC2 with motioneyeos for a simple and affordable setup.

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I have been using Q-See cameras and NVRs.

I also have used the open source iSpy software for Windows-based NVR.

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