I have been trying to find a camera that works with sighthound from Best Buy, Walmart, etc.
Wanting to keep the price under 200 for a wireless one. However it seems all the cameras now use a proprietary format?
Last one I tried was OCO camera.
A list of some low cost cameras would be great so people can go out and just buy from the list.
Thank You
Help - I cannot find a low end camera
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jbrannen - Posts: 24
- Joined: Wed Jan 21, 2015 8:37 am
Re: Help - I cannot find a low end camera
I'd recommend against wireless cameras and instead go for wired POE cameras. Logic there is that even a wireless camera is going to have to have power run to it....so it's still a wire you have to run. You'll need a POE network switch or POE injector as well. If you go that route, that are tons of cameras that are less than $200 to choose from.
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105437 - Posts: 27
- Joined: Wed Jun 24, 2015 3:07 pm
Re: Help - I cannot find a low end camera
I'm very happy with the two LTS CMIP3032 cameras I just bought. They were well under $200 each.
http://www.ltsecurityinc.com/cmip3032-28.html
http://www.ltsecurityinc.com/cmip3032-28.html
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Semper Vaporo - Posts: 331
- Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 11:51 am
Re: Help - I cannot find a low end camera
I just bought a "D-Link Cloud" camera... "HD Pan & Tilt Day/Night Network Camera" model "DCS 5222L" from Wal*Mart for $169.97 (No optical Zoom, the "zoom" mentioned on the box is just a magnification provided by the Browser interface.)
Took a bit of head scratching to get it to work on my system that has no "Internet" connection. They seem to want to have their camera talk to their server (the "Cloud") to set it up... (they expect the data path to be from camera to "Cloud" to your computer/cell phone/tablet) and the "help" on their web site lead me astray with what address it is set to from the factory... it said '192.168.0.1', but I found mine at "192.168.2.4". I had to do some other things to get it to work "my way", but once I could talk to it with the browser, the setup pages of the camera are pretty straight forward (though not without bugs, but they are in a mode that I won't be using... one bug is in setting up an automatic pan sequence where I had to select a position and store it, then exit the setup page and return to it before the selection showed up on the page).
I had to disable the IR LEDs because my camera is in the house aimed out a window to the outdoors and the LEDs reflects off the two window panes back into the camera and that washes out the image. And I shut off the IR filter that can kick in automatically at night, but I get a decent picture with just a small LED flood light near the area viewed.
You must do the initial setup using a wired connection but once the address and USER ID and PASSWORD are set, other parameters can be changed via WiFi whenever you want.
I also found I had to add '?svforcetcp' to the SightHound "Stream path" to get rid of random "smearing/distortion" of the bottom of the view caused by a loss of data (as discussed in other threads on this forum).
All in all, I find it to be quite acceptable... good color, crisp image, fairly good night vision with just the small LED flood light for the area I have it viewing. I do wish it was not quite so wide of an angle of view at 98°. (The previous camera I was using at this location was a TrendNET TV-IP400W, which I will move to a location where a wide angle is useless.)
I agree that a Wired connection is better than WiFi. WiFi is great, but tying up bandwidth with video can be a problem if you have many cameras, or are using WiFi for other things (game playing or movie streaming, etc.). Also can be a problem depending on how close your WiFi controller is to your neighbors and what channels you are all on.
Took a bit of head scratching to get it to work on my system that has no "Internet" connection. They seem to want to have their camera talk to their server (the "Cloud") to set it up... (they expect the data path to be from camera to "Cloud" to your computer/cell phone/tablet) and the "help" on their web site lead me astray with what address it is set to from the factory... it said '192.168.0.1', but I found mine at "192.168.2.4". I had to do some other things to get it to work "my way", but once I could talk to it with the browser, the setup pages of the camera are pretty straight forward (though not without bugs, but they are in a mode that I won't be using... one bug is in setting up an automatic pan sequence where I had to select a position and store it, then exit the setup page and return to it before the selection showed up on the page).
I had to disable the IR LEDs because my camera is in the house aimed out a window to the outdoors and the LEDs reflects off the two window panes back into the camera and that washes out the image. And I shut off the IR filter that can kick in automatically at night, but I get a decent picture with just a small LED flood light near the area viewed.
You must do the initial setup using a wired connection but once the address and USER ID and PASSWORD are set, other parameters can be changed via WiFi whenever you want.
I also found I had to add '?svforcetcp' to the SightHound "Stream path" to get rid of random "smearing/distortion" of the bottom of the view caused by a loss of data (as discussed in other threads on this forum).
All in all, I find it to be quite acceptable... good color, crisp image, fairly good night vision with just the small LED flood light for the area I have it viewing. I do wish it was not quite so wide of an angle of view at 98°. (The previous camera I was using at this location was a TrendNET TV-IP400W, which I will move to a location where a wide angle is useless.)
I agree that a Wired connection is better than WiFi. WiFi is great, but tying up bandwidth with video can be a problem if you have many cameras, or are using WiFi for other things (game playing or movie streaming, etc.). Also can be a problem depending on how close your WiFi controller is to your neighbors and what channels you are all on.
Semper Vaporo,