[ejstronge]

There's no reason to re-invent the wheel - ipcamtalk has a comprehensive set of explanatory posts. Don't buy Reolink, avoid Amcrest - Loryta (rebranded Dahua) and Hikvision are the strongest, but there are other strong options, especially on the refurbished commercial camera front.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I have a whole bunch of brands. I wrote ONVIF stuff, some years back. I gave up on it, as the spec sucks.

Hikvision has probably been the best "all-around" camera, but they may be subject to import restrictions.

Axis is very good (but un-cheap). Bosch is crappy (and also un-cheap).

I have a Dahua, which is quite good. I also have a pretty good Panasonic.

Funnily enough, probably the most reliable camera that I have, is also the cheapest. It's a $40 FLIR "eyeball" camera (not an IR camera -it's an OEM Chinese camera that several manufacturers rebrand).

A bunch of my cameras are obviously just rebrands of the same cheap crap. The software is abominable.

[eco]

ipcamtalk feels completely captured by resellers and affiliates. I'd suggest taking any advice you see there with a grain of salt.

[serf]

amcrest and reolink are some of the only large Chinese resellers that actually ensure onvif is implemented.

yeah they have a login wall without a reflash, but most of them do -- but the hardware isn't bad and you can keep it local after setup.

That said -- yes : hikvision is the de-facto generic IPcam without issues. Most CCTV softwares are built around hikvision cameras and firmwares as generics.

[BehindTheMath]

What's wrong with Amcrest IP cameras?

[apple4ever]

Was wondering the same. I have 10 and they have been pretty good.

(But they are on a VLAN without internet access.)

[colechristensen]

Why not buy Reolink? I bought one for my parents and it just works for them as well as can be expected. Local storage, local vision recognition of people/pets/vehicles, an app with push notifications. Maybe a little rough around the edges but for a non-cloud device it's pretty darn good.

We got the Duo Floodlight PoE for reference.

[sliken]

I was looking at $200 cameras that were PoE, designed for outdoors, and had an IR emitter to protect my car that someone tried to steal from my driveway.

Ended up with a pair of reolinks for $120, the spec was a bit less, but I got two cameras. I pointed them from the top of my garage door to both sides of the car, which doubly illuminated the driveway. The red illumination rings on the cameras were easy to spot from the sidewalk, hopefully preventing another attempt. The image quality was great, color during the day, B&W after dark. Ended up using it surprisingly often. Deliveries, kid pickup/drop off, mailman, identifying whatever big truck was visiting our dead end street, and ended up seeing more wildlife than I expected. Even at night I could clearly see the black seat belts inside a black car with a black interior.

I run a separate network for the camera so they can't talk to anything buy my server, so I'm not particularly worried about their network security and I like that the cameras are PoE and not wifi. Sure open source would be better, axis is decent on that front. They run a linux distro, you can ssh in, and even modify the linux distro with an overlap to customize it however you want.

[vladgur]

I have Reolink Duo Floodlight connected to frigate and it work great.

Excellent in Lowlight and has a configurable floodlight.

Also mega-wide field of view

[rexreed]

Here's what IPCam says about Reolink. Mostly bad night time performance: https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/convince-me-reolink-is-bad-to-...

[cchance]

hikvision are great, not sure why annke aren't mentioned more also, thats what i run and they're also really good.