SV3C 15X Optical Zoom POE PTZ Security Camera Outdoor, POE IP Cam with 5MP Auto Tracking, Floodlight Color Night Vision, 2-Way Audio, Metal Shell, RTSP, FTP, SD Card Record, Onvif Conformant (Wired)

TLDR: Just go buy this amazing camera and start enjoying it Today! Some features I really enjoy about this camera. Human Tracking. Yes, it works. It actually follows a human around, panning, tilting and zooming as needed. It needs a yet more powerful processor to keep real smooth, but it is satisfyingly on the right path and performs amazingly nice for this price point, this camera does so many things all at once that the little lag I experienced is totally acceptable. I simply go to preset 67 and let the algorithms do their thing. Preset 68 turns it back off if you wish. Night Vision. The LED's on this device light up the night some 200' away. Maybe you cannot read text on the label of a paint can, but you can surely see and recognize humans, and that is mainly the point of getting this security camera. The 15X Optical Zoom. Sure is fantastic! Yes, it is indeed optical zoom and the clarity of the image is spot on whether close or far. The optics sure do resolve the image well. If you are a DSLR or Mirrorless camera user you know that the lens is super important, not all lens resolve an image well - but this one gives me sharp, crisp, and contrast-y images that I am very pleased with, I am confident you will like them too. The Sony 335 sensor the sales flier touts really performs! I have two pictures with the pan and tilt at the same place, only the zoom is changed from 1X to 15X. Stunning to see all this detail in this camera. What an outstanding value. The OSD stamps. They are somehow less intrusive that on other IP camera that I have. Crisp font tight to the edge, and if they are on the wrong edge for my viewing needs, I use the web interface to move the position very easily. Video feed. I am in 'the States' so I use 60Hz (50Hz is available), H265 encoding(H264 is available), 2560x1920 image vs 2560x1440, but 9 fps is smooth enough to watch a cotton tail rabbit move about and captures vehicle traffic and humans just fine. Email alerts. Even if you are not using the cloud to store feed from this camera you might want to use this email feature. To set up I went to the company web site, Downloads, Hx POE series and followed the instructions on the PDF they provide. I especially like the security mind set involved here. It is no problem to use 2FA or two-step verification, have a provider like yahoo send a app passphrase for this device much like Android mail and then apply and test. Now I get alert email and even more I enabled send a picture so I get a 800k image of the trigger event. Nice. Viewing the stream. If like me you do not wish to use the phone to view this stream, (Nothing wrong with the camhi app, just personal preference to use other devices) then use a browser, any modern browser works. Go to the camera address and view all you like. I also use a media player program on my Linux box, Parole media player, and RTSP to view. This is so easy: rtsp://dotted.ip.Addr.ess:554/11 and it works. Some camera manufacturers that I have camera for say you can do this and have even provided me PDF instructions to stream with a complicated URL that I have great difficulty memorizing and all to no avail as they do not work in parole or VLC - but this camera surely does work and work well. Thank you SV3C!! NVR Compatibility. I record with Zoneminder. To add this I simply, click add, click the ONVIF icon, choose the camera IP address using 2.1, put in username and password combo, click next, choose my profile from the list, click save, then view. If for some reason that might not work I also tried cloning another camera and hand editing the settings and that works just fine too. I did not work with two way audio, the alarm or pan and tilt, but maybe all of those types of settings can be made to work almost as easy as a simple record of the stream such as this. The SV3C web site also lists instructions for blue iris if your needs run that direction. Sure is simple to have such a nice stream be in my NVR. POE powered. My ten port switch from Amazon supports 802.3af/at and it works well. I have the camera 315 feet of solid copper wire away and it is so cool to be able to do that. Power the camera and get the feed back and have access to the camera settings through a browser all on one piece of twisted pair. Awesome. So much better reach and stability than a wireless version in this setting. So here on Amazon the sales flier or whatever it is called - the listing for this camera - is chock full of so many details and once I stopped and read the whole page, I could not resist. I encourage you to read it closely and find your favorite details, surely some of the features will speak directly to you and you will want to own one of this model too. Someday the 8MP version might come along, but this really is a crisp, bright, robust, sturdy camera. So I am not going to wait and am very happy to have such a camera as this 5MP model. If you read this far then you deserve to see a list of: Things I would wish for in a future firmware. Users. I would dearly love to have the ability to create a couple users, say even two. Maybe five. Then I could call them whatever I wish and use unique passwords and life would be better. No doubt that would complicate things exceedingly from a programming perspective, so I will as a home user be happy to keep using this wonderful camera with just the one user. Yeah, I can only find one thing to wish for today. But Seriously, go buy one today before they are out of stock!

I am purchasing another SV3C camera because it is a great value for a high quality POE camera. I read a review where it does not work on Blue Iris or ONVIF. This is not true. I have had a BI system for over ten years and this camera integrated perfectly with the others. I love the zoom capability and the long distance clarity that this camera provides. I did note that the nighttime operation does have some imperfections in that if you have the sensitivity too high and the gaussian option selected, that might be attributed to the high bandwidth/processing demand at night when PTZ is used, but no glitches whatsoever during the day or when not moving it at night.

Overall: At this price point, this is a great option for a POE PTZ outdoor camera. It is entirely aluminum which feels durable and looks very nice. It's easy to setup and use, being fully ONVIF enabled. The feed quality is quite good with 5MP @ 1440p, and the 15x zoom is impressive. The PTZ control feels smooth and responsive. The humanoid tracking works excellently with very little need to tweak configurations. Overall I would recommend this camera to anyone looking for a easy to use and high quality POE PTZ outdoor camera at a relatively affordable price given its features, construction, and ease of use. --- Materials: The entire body and mounting arm are made of pretty thick aluminum, which lends a premium and durable feel. It came fully assembled, and even included plastic forceps for retrieving an SD card in the event that you drop it inside the housing while installing, which I thought was a very thoughtful detail. Also included are the usual ethernet cable, watertight connection covers, power adapter (in case you don't want to use POE), and mounting bracket and hardware. It was packaged securely with an exact foam cutout where the camera snugly fits. --- Setup: Being ONVIF conformant makes this camera very simple to set up. I chose to use the included power adapter as I don't have a POE injector or capable router, so I just plugged in to an outdoor socket and ran an ethernet from my modem. Once you've connected the ethernet, you can access the camera configuration right away through a browser using the camera's IP, or connect via an ONVIF application such as iSpy Agent. It supports all the standard IP camera options such as FTP, SMTP, alarms, scheduling, network config, auto and timer snaps, etc. It took me no more than 5 - 10 minutes to get the camera configured to my liking. I was able to view the RTSP streams via VLC right away, and to further configure with iSpy Agent for things like AI object detection and other software-level features. Just about as close to plug-and-play as you can get. --- Video: Quality: The video quality is crisp and high quality. 5MP @ 1440p looks great and the image is very clear. It seems live playback can run at a max of 15fps, although I wasn't able to determine if the camera was limited to that fps, or if the software I was using (iSpy Agent) was. PTZ: The PTZ pans 355 degrees, with the mounting arm being the position it stops at when you reach the right or left max. It tilts 90 degrees. Since the connection is via ethernet, the PTZ feels very responsive, and the speed is sufficient for the tracking feature. Night-Vision: Having 12 IR & white LEDs, the night vision mode works perfectly. I was surprised about the white LEDs as usually I just use IRs, but I imagine there are scenarios where the white's would come in handy. While I was testing the tracking at night, the white LEDs actually startled me when they turned on, because of how bright they are! Easily as much light as a medium sized floodlight. It felt like I was getting lit up by one of those Half-Life city scanner robots, lol. Automatic Tracking: The built-in tracking feature is actually the reason I decided to try this camera. At this price, I was very impressed with the humanoid tracking it comes equipped with. It requires no software to use, and can be enabled in the camera's browser page configuration. Once enabled, you view the stream on the monitor tab and call Preset 67 there to turn the tracking on (and Preset 68 to turn it off). The position the camera is in when you call Preset 67 determines the camera's home position, which is where it returns once it is done tracking an object. The camera has the option to box the tracking target (or not to), and both pans and zooms in order to keep the tracked object in view. I've included a video I took while testing the tracking that I used to determine how far it could be pushed. For reference, in the video, the light pole is about 75 feet from my deck stairs, the near side of the garage is about 100 feet, and the corner I round is about 150 feet away. The camera stayed locked on to me while walking away until about 100 feet, and locked back on to me while walking towards it at about 80 feet. With a good tuning of the video and image settings, I would imagine I could push it even further. The video I took was with no changes to the image settings, only the video settings. Together with AI features such as those found in iSpy Agent, I can both track objects using the built-in tracking AND use the AI to identify them, then that information can then be used to trigger actions, alarms, etc. The combination enables a surprising number of specific use-cases like animal tracking, traffic analysis, enhanced security, and tons more. Very cool!