Let’s talk about cameras. POE Cameras. I need to get 36 of them, so I bought a few different ones to test.. nothing crazy extensive, but enough for me to compare across a few different costs. I have a bunch of Hikvision ones (I used them in the current house), a Dahau, a few ReoLink ones (new), and a few Ubiquity ones (including a G3 and a G4 Pro).

The cost spread is significant. The Reolink $40, the Hikvision about $100, the Dahau about $150, the G3 about $140, and the G4 Pro about $450. Consider at the cheap end 36 Reolinks would cost $1140, while 36 G4 Pros would cost $16,000.

There is no question that the G4 Pro has the best video quality.. it is just stellar, but I was surprised that all of the other ones were very very similar to each other. The Reolink seemed a tad worse than the G3, but I doubt I could pick one from the other in a lineup and be confident.

People often mention the risk in the Chinese cameras (Reolink, Hikvision, etc) of them being compromised or being a security risk, but of course only the most unqualified network engineer would ever have these cameras in a subnet that has outside routable access. These will be in a dedicated physical network.

It is possible the Reolink or Hikvision will fail sooner.. of course interestingly enough I have 12 Hikvision cameras here now that have been running for 4+ years, as well as I had 4 of the Ubiquity first gen cameras that have all died. Consider for the price difference I could buy 7 spares for every camera in the house. That is a lot of spares.

(Note I will probably use BlueIris to record everything, although I have been testing Xeoma and it has worked well so far).

Any comments, suggestions, price comparisons?