Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I CCTV POE 3MP Bullet IP HD Security Network Camera, 4mm

Love this camera. Originally purchased a Foscam camera, but it was very large, the video skipped and the resolution was a lot lower than the Hikvision. I really like the high resolution of this camera. I have 5 mounted outside around my house and 1 mounted in the baby's bedroom. I find the small size and white color works quite well in the bedroom. While the Foscam has two way sound, pan/movement, and a memory card, I found that I still liked the Hikvision better. I didn't need or want to move the cameras after they were in the right place so the extra size and cost of the feature didn't help a lot. The sound wasn't that great without using an external mic or speakers so I wouldn't have ended up using it. The memory card would have been useful, but I now have it hooked up to an NVR with 4 TB, so the point it moot. All in all they allocated the budget towards creating a high resolution compact camera that works great and saves me from having to pay for various features I most likely wouldn't use.The options are fairly extensive in the camera. I spent a long time fiddling around with things, but ended up only using a fraction of the features available. Strange thing with the daylight saving setting, there seems to be a bug/glitch of some sort and it took changing a few times before it stuck with the right time. Also figuring out what many of the features do is challenging. The manual is typically no help. Usually it will say something like Menu Y, Feature X. To use Feature X, select on. It sometimes gives a little description of what it means, but typically I had to search on Google to find how others were using it.Firmware was fairly easy to update. The best source is to go to their ftp server which you can find by Googling fairly easy.Support is very strange. Some are supported through China others through the US. I ordered 4 from one place and 2 from another and one group have US support, the others China support. Neither have the Chinese firmware which is fairly notorious if you do a search through Google you'll see that some have the date in Chinese and it's difficult to hack so that it accepts the US updated firmware. My advice would be to so to the list of sellers in Amazon and take a look at the seller comments. They will usually spell out which ones are authentic US versions. I typically paid around $125-$130 from the 2 venders. I steered away from purchasing from those that said they were shipping from Hong Kong or China. I didn't want to wait for the shipping and I was afraid they'd be the Chinese version with the locked firmware.Regardless, if you call Hikvision they'll immediately try to get you to get your support from the company that sold it to you. It's one of the first questions they'll ask you and then they'll immediately ask that you get your support from the company that sold it to you.Motion detection is fairly raw on this camera. It works pretty well as motion detection in a bedroom as a baby camera. There are only occasional false detections in this scenario. However, outside is a different story. I have it set to 50% sensitivity and it is always getting false detects. It's as low as I dare without missing intended motion, but it still bugs me that they can't do a better job at this. Night vision with motion detection was a total no-go with me on the exterior cameras. It worked fine indoors, but outside the IR lights attracted too many bugs and they were tripping the motion sensor nearly 100% of the time. What I did to solve this was I turned it permanently to day mode and in the front of the house I have auto-turn-on lights that come on at dark and turn off at 3am in the morning. The quality of video is nearly identical between night vision and day mode at night with lights turned on. Don't expect to be making out exact detail on faces in either scenario, you don't have enough light in either case. In the rear of the house I also have it permanently set to day mode, but I have motion sensing separate lights which illuminate the yard if there is movement. Because the other light has a better motion sensor it works just fine. It sits in darkness until there is motion at which point there is sufficient light to record the event. I suppose I could also disable the IR lights and use separate IR lights but I found my current configuration works well. I hope they do some further improvements to motion sensing in subsequent firmware updates.

Hardware & IP setup is simple; picture quality is good. The documentation however, is horrible; unbelievably bad; pure crap; total joke. There is no way to understand what the various options do; for example, when you look up the doc about the motion detection sensitivity option (is higher number more sensitive, or less sensitive), it'll say something like "sets the motion sensitivity"... So you basically have to go through trial and error to understand how the various options work.Despite the worst possible documentation ever, I had been pretty happy with these cameras so far. Sadly, out of the 4 I bought, one died after 6 months.Been trying to obtain an RMA number from the hikvision.com site, but none of the links I can find there work. Now I have to wait for them to reply to my email request.... this gives me time to write a review. The web site is basically as good as their documentation.But the wrost pat is yet to come. I got a response from hivisoin after a couple days, and here is what they said:<<<<Thank you, unfortunately warranty for these units are voided if they are purchased from an unauthorized distributor such as Amazon. Please click the link for more information. http://www.hikvision.com/en/us/UnauthorizedDistributors.asp.We value your business and want to ensure that our products are available for you. If you’d like to purchase our products, please contact one of our distribution partners. You can find a list of our partners here: http://www.hikvision.com/en/us/distributionParter.Thank you,Hannah EvangelistaSales Assistantcid:3C337671-209D-4710-8139-D153DA96065F908 Canada CourtCity of Industry, CA 91748(Main: 909-895-0400(Direct: 909-612-90517 909-595-2788* [email protected]>>>>*************************************************************************************************************************************Update 12/26/2015:Well it's about 3 months later, and we got our first real rain. Turns out, these as not as weatherproof as advertised. Both the connector and the camera have let water in. The connector was completely filled and the inside of the lens is covered with condensation (See picture). Don't know yet if anything is salvageable as I'm letting things dry out now.