Reviews
Sturdy cameras that do the job for the price
I bought two of the Amcrest ProHD 1080P WiFi Camera 2MP (1920TVL) units. One of them fell 5 feet and still worked perfectly. It fell from a door where it had been stuck with double side gorilla tape as that same night the temperature dropped to 40 F, which messed with the adhesive. That has nothing to do with the camera, but, now you know WHY it fell. I assumed the camera was ruined. I snapped the camera back into it's housing and to my surprise, not a single issue with it has come up. These things are pretty well constructed apparently. It fell onto wood flooring.Aside from that, installation was definitely a pain in the butt. I could not get the units to connect to wifi (yes on 2.4Ghz with phone on that same channel), so I had to directly connect them with an ethernet cable. From there, I had to download and run Amcrest IP Config to get the camera's IP address for WebView. After setting those up, I was able to remove the cable and they connected to wifi.Accessing the cameras through the Amcrest WebView is non-ideal. You have to memorize the IP address of each camera you're logging into in order to get into the admin/settings. But accessing the cameras through a phone is worse for PC primary users. I work at a PC all day with multiple monitors. Having an installed program that runs like Amcrest Surveillance is better, but, some things are better handled through Amcrest WebView. Running apps on a phone is non-ideal for this kind of task. Yes it can be considered convenient, but, it's limited screen space compared to the multitude of settings and screens you go into is just best left to a desktop with larger screen area.Overall the software side of this product is a huge mess. Documentation leads you to various places, some outdated. They really need to sit down and consolidate all of their documentation. This product is low cost enough for general public but Amcrest is doing itself no favors by having the installation almost forced through mobile, with a more difficult set up through desktop.For simple viewing for other family members, I don't even use the Amcrest app, but instead Owlr as it's easy of setup and use is what Amcrest really should look to strive for.On the note of nightvision, well, I couldn't really test this as these are indoor cameras and the reflection off the glass as they're pointed outdoors just causes visual feedback from the IR to where you can see nothing but the IR light ring. It's clearly not a fault of the product as I don't think the intent is to pass through something that will reflect the IR ring of lights. Even cleaning the window perfect did no good, but, once again not a fault of the camera.All of that aside, once you get things running, and spend days testing out your motion capture and settings, you'll have some decent cameras that end up costing you more learning and setup time than they do cost money, which honestly I can afford the learning time more than I can the money!Last note, I'm using a 128GB memory card with these even though they are rated for only a 32GB card. The Silicon Power 128GB Superior Pro Micro SDXC UHS-I (U3), V30 4K A1, High Speed MicroSD Card with Adapter on Amazon.- I give this 5 stars for the cost to performance of the hardware alone.- I give it 1 star for the setup and software. Sorry but phone apps aren't a good reason to not handle the other software, especially if the wifi isn't a foolproof option for setup.- I give it 5 stars for durability. Who knew?- I give this 5 stars for image quality.A pretty good camera brought down by horrible setup and software, but brought back up by cost of unit.
27/04/2020
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