Looking at adding some cameras around the house to keep an eye on things. I have a UniFi network however I'm concerned around the UniFi network cameras being too expensive for their performance.

I also have a Asustor NAS I can store the video recordings on so that I'm not limited to UniFi cameras. I'm looking for 6 wide angle style cameras and 2 bullet style where I would like to see up to about 80 yards to the front of the property. I'm a little out of touch if some cameras can handle both of these needs well or if I am looking at 2 styles. I will be using POE via Cat5E cables and all installation locations will be soffit mounts.

ForeverAg said:

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Looking at adding some cameras around the house to keep an eye on things. I have a UniFi network however I'm concerned around the UniFi network cameras being too expensive for their performance.

I also have a Asustor NAS I can store the video recordings on so that I'm not limited to UniFi cameras. I'm looking for 6 wide angle style cameras and 2 bullet style where I would like to see up to about 80 yards to the front of the property. I'm a little out of touch if some cameras can handle both of these needs well or if I am looking at 2 styles. I will be using POE via Cat5E cables and all installation locations will be soffit mounts.

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I'd stay away from the Unifi cameras. They're never in stock. They're super expensive for what they are if you aren't using a Unifi NVR with Protect, and they seem to fail right after warranty expires.

I mostly use Dahua cams from EmpireAndy for my POE cams. He has some custom firmware that supposedly pulls out the China backdoors, but they should still be on an IOT vlan.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08C77TNY9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That varifocus should do what you need. You can optical zoom it in or do a wide angle. I'd buy one and term install it in a few places. From there you can figure out if you need varifocus or whether one of the cheaper fixed focus cameras would work better.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S47VXGY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I believe Reolink has some dual sensor cameras that do wide/close in one camera.

PoE is ideal for wired cameras. Dahua makes a lot of rebranded stuff. Reolink has a new model that combines two cameras in the device before outputting the image. Whatever you do, I would spring for the highest definition camera you can and make sure you get one that will do lower quality sub streams at the same time (the Reolinks do). That way you don't bog down the network streaming high def at all times, just when motion is detected or some other event requires recording.

If you can run Blue Iris on your network to capture the streams and handle motion detection and event recording, that's a good option. It isn't free software but it's stable and has a bunch of features that are helpful. It will take effort setting up in the beginning though. Careful upgrading that one. You'll buy a license for a year of upgrades and then when it's up, the next upgrade will actually flip you back to the trial version.

Frigate has been making headway and seems to be getting much better. It has the added bonus of being able to identify what is in the picture (car, person, dog, etc). I don't have much experience with that one though.

Pinochet said:

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PoE is ideal for wired cameras. Dahua makes a lot of rebranded stuff. Reolink has a new model that combines two cameras in the device before outputting the image. Whatever you do, I would spring for the highest definition camera you can and make sure you get one that will do lower quality sub streams at the same time (the Reolinks do). That way you don't bog down the network streaming high def at all times, just when motion is detected or some other event requires recording.

If you can run Blue Iris on your network to capture the streams and handle motion detection and event recording, that's a good option. It isn't free software but it's stable and has a bunch of features that are helpful. It will take effort setting up in the beginning though. Careful upgrading that one. You'll buy a license for a year of upgrades and then when it's up, the next upgrade will actually flip you back to the trial version.

Frigate has been making headway and seems to be getting much better. It has the added bonus of being able to identify what is in the picture (car, person, dog, etc). I don't have much experience with that one though.

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Deepstack with BI has been great. I used to get tons of false alarms for trees/grass moving and it missed lots of people. I wish it had more AI filters. It identifies deer as dogs so I get tons of dog alerts. I think there's a community filter that has trained that better. Biggest issue is it detects stationary cars as moving somewhat frequently. I haven't dug into what's causing that though.

I've been running BI4 since it came out. Just upgraded to BI5 a few months ago when I read about Deepstack. I wouldn't ever update BI otherwise. If it ain't broke...

Another + for Blue Iris.

The recent updates have preferred SenseAI instead of Deepstack, which had worked better for me. Less of a CPU hog which helps in identification accuracy for me.

Keep in mind, resolution is not always king, especially when worried about night vision capabilities. A 1.8" CMOS 2k will handily beat a 2.7" CMOS 4k at night.

As the poster above mentioned, EmpireTech Andy has good stuff available. Shop his store on Amazon.