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(More customer reviews)I bought this and two IP8161 (indoor box shape model of this one) along with HP's POE 8-port managed switch. First of all, I mounted all of them outside. Hold on!. I live in southern Arizona. The indoor models are mounted up under the eves of my house to keep the elements off of them. The wind may reach them but the sun and rain won't unless it's blowing beyond sideways. For a couple of nights, it got down to less than 16 degrees and they survived. No breaks in the constant video feed. I've had these running within a couple of weeks after buying them and none of them have needed a reset yet. To date, I have not seen any review talking serious about how well it resolves an image and how well its motion detection worked. Like probably other similar megapixel cams, this one works too. This one supports 4 streams, one is locked to a low res a 5fps for PDAs and smart phones. I don't use it. Instead, I have the other 3 streams set for 1600x1200x15fps, two on H.264 and one on MJPEG (which does not do audio) and I use my Ipod touch 3g and the free Live Cams v4.80 app to listen in on the video stream. It only supports MJPEG. Anyway, I'm able to precisely focus the FD8361 using the Ipod. The Live Cams software allows me to digitally zoom in as well as do the two-finger zoom on the touch pad screen for additional zoom. At this level, I can focus to a nat's butt, so to speak. The view is just over 90 degrees. The auto-iris lens works fine. Resolution is pretty much as I expected but night vision wasn't quite there. At night, the camera increases the gain on its video amplifier and the image is ridden with vertical and horizontal lines. The best way to describe this is to take a black and white picture that's wet and take a paint brush to it vertically and horizontally, leaving paint brush lines in the picture. The picture isn't smeared, it's still viewable. My cameras are set for the widest field of view and they overlook about 70-100 feet. During the day, at the extreme distance, I can still tell who it is, their hair color and style, shoes, clothes, whether they're texting on a phone. Now I can't tell that they're actually holding a phone in their hand but the jester gives it away. I can see facial features but of course, not eye color or any detail to that level because at about 70 feet, a face only covers a pixel area of 16x16 on the image. You can't draw a face with that few pixels. When not zoomed in so close and the subject moves through the pixelated screen, the human brain can perceive facial features. Also, cars drive by the corner of my image. The camera snapshots them without smearing. The cars are about 300 feet away but the snapshots are clear enough that I can see the driver outline, the car type, but I'm sure I can't read tags if they were facing me. I didn't expect this but you still cannot see the eyes. They're just dark spots on the face.
For night vision, I have no IR lights set up and I switched off the built-in lights. They do light up the peripheral to some extent, but at a 90 degree FOV, the center of the image receives the most light. I suppose you can go in and bend the individual LEDs outward to spread out the light some. It looks possible but it could crack the solder connections, so be forewarned! I found that the internal lights do cause a reflection in the dome, putting a slight haze on the image. So instead, I use a 40-Watt regular bulb from my front door light to illuminate the yard. I set the camera for black and white but not to go any slower than 1/15th second exposure rate. Although as an experiment, I let it go to 1/5th second and even on the darkest night with all of the lights off, I could see everything although moving objects are pretty much blurry at this rate. There are a couple of street lights not too far away and they are the orangy sodium vapor lights. Anyway, back to the 40-Watt light, let's set the scene. The light is mounted next to my front door. My FD8361 mounts down the length of the house 30 feet away from the door. The door sits at the right edge of the camera's field of view. The light shows as a bright spot (typical) in the upper right corner of the screen but does not obscure anything around it beyond a foot. The driveway is another 20 feet beyond the light, and runs from the right to the left of the field of view, leading from the edge of the house and exits the left side of the screen. In black and white at 1/15th second exposure rate, the camera can see everything in the yard, the grass, the parked car, the trees, side of the house, the front door, people walking up the driveway, to the front door. Wearing black or white clothing doesn't matter, the camera picks them up and I can see their face walking towards the camera and it's not that blurry. When they stop at the door, I can see them better. The entire image is fuzzy, but I can still tell who it is if I know them. If I don't know them, I can still pick up enough details to probably make a profile.
When I first set up the cameras temporarily, the screen was partially obscured by being too far up in the eve and the eve blocked about 20-30% of the image. The camera constantly readjusted its exposure setting which caused havoc with the motion detection. Once I got the eves mostly out of the way of the screen, not completely, this problem went away and now I could use the motion detection.
Motion detection works. The camera has the ability to just grab a single key frames periodically which is settable and then grab full motion video when it detects motion. This saves tons of hard drive space. Additionally, it remembers several seconds of full video before and after the motion detection window and saves all of the footage. The time stamp in the video is great. There are separate motion detection settings for day and night modes.
My server is my computer. It's an iCore 7 920 running stock 2.66 GHz with 6 Gigs of memory on an Asus motherboard. I have three 1-terabyte hard drives. One is the system drive and all my junk. The other two are dedicated to the security cameras. I'm running all three cameras at 15fps continuous video without motion detection controlling the video frame rate. I can't tell that my computer is receiving three 6 megabit data streams and saving them to those two hard drives. I work my PC hard even with virtual machines running. Here's a scenario I do regularly. It's in my bedroom with two monitors, one is a big screen. I'm watching the O'Rielly Factor, my wife's scanning articles using the scanner button while the PC scanning software pulls that data, I'm cruising the internet, and I have VMWare running XP with special CAD software running all the time, all at the same time. Scenarios like this happen all the time and I have not lost any video from any of the cameras. The TV shows run smooth as silk and the camera software doesn't miss a frame. No I have not tried a game and it would have to be Paradise City. I keep forgetting to try.
Speaking of software, the software that comes with the camera is fully functional and has been error free and the hard drive management has been perfect. I configured the server to reserve 100 GBytes of space on one drive and 2 GBytes on the second one. One time, I stored about 40 GBytes of movies to one of those drives, and the server deleted 40 GBytes of the oldest security video files to maintain that 100 GBytes reserve space on the drive. Now, I can't tell you if it deleted files from the other drive that were at least that old and moved files from this drive to the other in order to maintain time continuity in all the video files. I didn't check. It doesn't matter because this is something you don't do unless you're testing a feature. The playback software is lacking. I can start at any point in a day and start watching and there fast forwards up to 64 times normal speed. Beyond 8x, though, frames are skipped. There is no play backwards. That's a problem. When you're just browsing, the time bar shows the whole 24-hour video time bar and just moving a pixel equates to several minutes. It's hard to navigate at any granularity. I wind up opening the specific video files individually at the target time period to get finer control in moving the video across the time bar.
A word about POE. It's great! At the time of this review, my switch shows one pulls 4.3 Watts, another pulling 4.7 Watts, and the last is pulling 3.9 Watts. I guess the heater's off and of course the IR LEDs are off too.
There is one difference between the IP8161 and FD8361 internal web server interface each camera provides. The IP8161 main screen has view size buttons across the top of the live image, allowing you to reduce the viewed image to fit your screen but it works a little quirky in fitting in the browser window. Be careful with it. The FD8361 does not have this feature. I've updated the firmware in all my cameras. Also, in case you're wondering, I bought an IP8161 and a 4XEM IP8161 and I can't tell the difference (physically or software) between them.
I wasn't sure it'd be worth the money. I cringed at submitting the purchase. Even after all the reviewing of so many cameras and those costing far more, I was afraid. My focus was on 1600x1200 resolution, image clarity, lens size, frame rate, motion detection, and H.264 encoding. Small size was another focus at first but then I gave up on that. Now that I have three of them and they work flawlessly, I don't think I could be happier with one exception. I wish they were made in America.
Update: Recently, all three of these cameras endured a night of 6 degrees for about 5 hours. There was no wind. I'm sure that if they were powered down before the night got this cold, they would be too cold to power up. Since they were already powered up, the heat they generated probably kept the electronics from getting too cold to function properly.
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Click here for more information about 4XEM Day/Night Vandal Proof Fixed Dome Network Camera 4X-FD8361 - Network camera - PTZ - outdoor - vandal / weatherproof / tamper-proof - color ( Day&Night ) - auto iris - vari-focal - audio - 10/100 - DC 12 V / AC 24 V
