Performance:

One of the first things I noticed with this camera was the excellent resolution. You have the ability to resolve details like license plates much further away than a standard 1080p camera. The next thing I noticed were that the colors appeared to be a bit off. Looking at the images below you can compare this 4K (left) camera to the Husky (right). To me the Husky has more natural colors, especially when you look at the grass. It isn’t terrible, but it does look a bit off. I did try to play with the settings available through the NVR UI, but I was never able to make it look quite right.



While it is somewhat visible in the images above, the images below really show another huge difference between these 4K (below left) and Husky (below right) cameras. While the 4K has a slightly narrower field of view, the lens is so much more efficient. Both images were taken at basically the same time (one minute apart) and you can see so much more detail, especially in the yard. Where the Husky’s image is very dark, the 4K camera looks like a daytime image. Because of this I was hopeful that the IR performance would be leaps and bounds better. Unfortunately, this was not the case.



As you can see in the images below; 4k (below left) and Husky (below right). I do see that the EXIR illumination is more even as they claim, but I think it has slightly more noise than the Husky cam.



Looking at the final image below you can see that this noise appears to be more pronounced if there isn’t much in the foreground. In this image the pool fence is about 60 feet away vs about 20 feet to the trees in the front porch pics. Certainly though the IR performance is more than adequate to see what is going on around your home in the dark and IR range is as they claim.



As mentioned previously in the Basics, I was a bit concerned about the Ethernet coupler not having any seal like the Husky camera. But I have to say that after a few months of exposure this has not been an issue and all but one of these couplers was fully exposed to the elements of an extremely wet spring. But with that said I may still opt to wrap these in some tape just to try to make sure they stay dry.

Access via the app was smooth, but on occasion you would get a message indicating your device isn’t capable of playing the resolution. If you click OK it will change to the low resolution stream (whatever you set as substream) but if you click outside of the window it will often stay in high resolution stream. The low quality, Basic as they call it, is certainly enough to see if there is something amiss but not enough to make out unknown faces etc.



Operation of the NVR was very easy and fairly intuitive. Though I do wish there was more detailed info on how to set up individual settings so you aren’t blindly changing things. There is a manual online for another model, but reviewing the menus and screen caps it appears to be basically the same UI. So you could use this as a good reference for settings and what they do.

The motion detection is a bit hit and miss. I think this really comes down to what is in your field of view. For me, many of the areas I am concerned about have some plants or trees nearby. Setting the motion areas did help significantly but you do get false positives on occasion, especially at night. As mentioned above, if there is nothing close to the camera to reflect that IR you get more noise. This noise often means you get false alarms. While you can set a schedule for motion detection I would prefer the ability to set different sensitivities from day to night. I did not see that anywhere in the settings. Some of these issues can be minimized further using their line detection or intrusion detection settings, they will still trigger false alarms with this IR noise. But since you have a large HDD to store these recordings it isn’t a big deal unless you are trying to find out when something happened. For instance, a few weeks back there was a huge pile of feathers in my backyard by the fire pit. I tried to go back and look at the recordings to see what happened but with multiple recordings I found myself jumping around quite a bit. Ironically, I never found out what happened. I could see in one clip there was a bird walking through my yard, the next clip there was just a pile of feathers. While I suspect a hawk took him out I am surprised this didn’t get captured. Maybe it was too small and too far away to trigger the sensitivity threshold.