Best Orion Surveillance Systems

Had the camera run well enough for 2 years, just went off line and cannot be turned back on no matter what I try. Guess the redundancy clock timed… Read more

out and killed it now the warranty is gone. Was protected sitting under the eaves with IP65. Rubbish as usual steer clear of them.

Backing up data from storage card to computer – The SD card is very tricky to remove - the button does not actually eject it enough to grasp. Once attached to Windows PC you have the options to… Read more

delete or make a copy to PC but you will not be able to view anything on computer because the files are a .data format and are not recognized. Even VLC media player can't read them. There may be software to convert them but the effort and cost is not worth it unless some footage is really important. You need to replace the card and use the app on your phone to view the footage before it it overwritten.

This rechargeable WIFI camera worked fine at the start but after about 15 months stopped intermittently recognising the Micro SD Card. Then it just… Read more

failed to recognise the card all together. The camera itself is still working but I'm unable to record or play back anything. It's not been good at recognising movement or switching back on after going to sleep. It also doesn't warn you when the battery is low and has just stopped due to this several times. The night vision is not good even with a night light near the camera.

This camera takes a few days to learn and then customize it to your specific situation. It does a decent job for the price but you should keep your… Read more

expectations low and approach with maximum patience.

WIFI - works well, I was expecting to need an ethernet cable but it gets the wifi even through a few brick walls and 20 metres or so.

CONNECTIVITY WITH APP - works decently. There's a lag of about two seconds.

VIDEO PLAYBACK = this requires an SD card. The camera can be set to either a) record constantly or b) record "events". In the latter case it will stop recording 30seconds after movement finishes. You can watch the playback on a crude timeline/calendar. Without the card inserted you only get a still image for each event. So the card is very useful..s

NIGHT VISION / LIGHT = there's a good infrared camera that comes on automatically at dark. The camera can also automatically switch the light on when it senses movement. This could easily scare the pants off the trespasser. You can also turn the light on manually.

MOTION TRACKING = the camera will actually follow movement around the yard. So a person will be tracked and it's very intimidating to look up and see a camera moving as you move! Afterwards teh camera returns to it's original position. However there's no way to limit motion tracking to humans. It will follow cats, dogs, insects, birds, leaves blowing in the wind.

AUDIO = yes, you can optionally hear what's happening. There's also a speaker and you can talk directly to the area by pressing the call button.

RECORDING TO PHONE = you can easily record still images or video to your phone

MOTION ALERTS = this is obviously one of the core features of the device but at time of writing it does not work well (See my experience at the end of this review). There are three sensitivity settings and a human filter. You probably want to spend a while getting this right, depending on your environment.

NOTIFICATION SOUND = once it detects either motion or a human (depending on filter) it sends a notification to your phone, and also potentially starts recording to the card. Unfortunately there's no way to alter the notification sound, at least not that I've found so far (on Android). It's relatively subtle, like a door chime. It probably wouldn't wake you up at night. Ideally you would be able to change it to a proper alarm sound.

MANUAL MOVEMENT = you can manually move the camera around by scrolling the video or using the direction pad. However it's very clunky and fine adjustments are impossible. The lag doesn't help.

SITES = you can set the camera to remember certain positions. This is very helpful if you want to point around a yard for example or put certain things out of frame. It's easier than trying to move it manually.

SCHEDULE - You can set the camera to record continuously for certain times of the day (ie all night). You can also turn the alerts on or off by schedule, so that it will only alert you if there's movement during the night for example.

MY EXPERIENCE AND CRITICISM :-( ____________________________________________________________________ Unfortunately the human filter is NOT compatible with either motion tracking or manual movement. This seems to be an epic programming fail. Moving the camera either manually or automatically sets off the alert about 50% of the time. So if the camera moves to follow a flying insect it will incorrectly trigger a human alert. It's very frustrating because it appears that the good features of the camera have been sabotaged by abysmal software design. Hopefully they fix this on a future update of the app.

The human filter itself is also very unimpressive. It might have been considered good in the 90s but in 2025 it is laughably crude. Over about a week I tried every combination of settings - all the sensitivity settings, disabling and enabling motion tracking and the human filter. I also tried pointing the camera at different places in the yard, ie very low so that there were less trees and shadows. Unfortunately there was no setting that did not produce at least one or two false alerts per day. Sometimes the false alert was a cat, bird or insect. Other times the false alert appeared to be nothing at all. Maybe something flew past the lens in the split second before recording started, or maybe it was a gust of wind. No way to tell what triggered the alert.

Also worth mentioning that after using two cameras for about a week, one of them seemed to develop a hardware fail with the light sensor. The camera did not automatically enter IR mode at darkness. Instead it glitched out and produced a disintegrating image. I was able to take the camera back and get a replacement.

So are they completely useless? No. I am able to tolerably utilize the cameras by turning off the notification sounds(etc) on my phone. In this way the notifications still come through but do not distract me. The camera records events to the card and I can review them later (ie once a day) to see if anything suspicious has happened.

I also got into the habit of turning on and off the cameras at the mains switch. There doesn't appear to be any drawbacks to doing this and it's better than using the "privacy mode". The camera retains all previous settings when it comes back online and always shows up as expected in the app. However when you turn the cameras on you hear a loud "welcome", which is pretty funny because you're probably in the process of leaving the area.

CONCLUSION: These cameras are obviously not very expensive so I guess in terms of money value it's still a decent product. In terms of being a satisfying user experience though I'd give them a one out of ten.