They’re well regarded as relabeled Dahuas but I haven’t tried one.
I just found it interesting that they seem to have in-camera person detection and they advertise as not needing any cloud solution. I have several Amcrest cameras and just bought an Amcrest NVR for them to do my own thing without any cloud requirements. Might consider one of these cameras for my next round.
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The Wyze AI is soo broken and they really should not be charging us for something that doesn’t work.
Hey @WildBill , I’m taking a closer look at Amcrest. Their PoE NVRs start at only $109 and I can get an outdoor cam with 5 MP, a starlight sensor, and onboard AI / human detection for $89. I’m a little fed up with WiFi cameras.
Really the only thing it’s missing is a speaker (and my favorite Wyze feature of Alexa person announcements).
They have about 30 million models though, and their web site stinks. (Chat box refuses to stay closed, among other things.)
Have you learned anything interesting? Please private message me if you’d rather.
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Haven’t had time yet to setup the nvr but it looks promising. I got the NV4116-HS off eBay and the IP5M-T1179EW turret cameras from Amazon. Camera has a good image and I got them for $49 each. Also have two older indoor PTZ cams to connect.
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Thanks. Decent PoE switches start around $50 and even a Pi server will cost more than $50 so it seems almost stupid NOT to just get a PoE NVR instead…
I’d prefer to stick with TinyCam Pro but my current Fire tablet is a little underpowered. (It actually works fine, even as a web server and NVR, but it can be sluggish and drop frames.)
Here are couple of pictures from the cams.
Turret (currently sitting on a shelf):
PTZ (wall mounted):
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Hah, “Blood Shed”.
Yes. My daughter works in film/tv as a make-up artist, a significant amount is horror, zombies and the like. She worked on Z-Nation for a while.
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Oh, I assumed it was a joke about workshop accidents.
That works as well!
Another thing about the cameras is they are fully accessible via a web browser. From my ubuntu laptop with Firefox:
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Hmm, just found out they charge $6 per month per camera for any kind of Alexa integration? There may also be a “free” tier that charges $2/month.
There’s a “new” free plan with streaming only - I can’t quite tell if that still works with Alexa.
Yes, that’s one of the drawbacks. Not sure I really care that much as Alexa integration for cameras doesn’t do much for me. With Amcrest you can get email notifications with attachments of images and, I think, video. I have the free cloud account but haven’t tested to see what can be done with Alexa. Think it’s just displaying the video on the Echo devices.
Update: Quick search indicates all you can do with the Amcrest cameras on Alexa is display the stream. Can’t find anything on using them for triggers.
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Hmm, thanks. I’d pay if they had Alexa person announcements like Wyze but I’m thinking that even paid accounts don’t have that feature?
Not as far as I can tell.
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