Imou Bullet 2C 4MP

A good camera, but expensive to use – I wanted a decent camera that could replace my often unreliable smart phones that were acting as security cameras. I found Imou to have good ratings, pretty good feedback, and was priced well, around AUD$80 for two cameras. Once they arrived, one had a faulty power adaptor, the seller responded quickly and within a week they sent a replacement. … Read more

Setting up the camera was pretty straight forward, it had a Q code which made it pretty easy. Once I set up both cameras I discovered that without a subscription, the cameras was pretty pointless. So I signed up one camera for 3 months to see how they worked.

With a subscription, the camera is great, it senses movement, sends you an alert, and you can view the footage and download it to your phone. However, without a subscription, all you get is the alert and a tiny thumbnail with no detail visible. When you try to play the video, you are directed to buy a subscription. So, you can use the camera without paying, and you will get an alert, but you cannot see what set the camera off unless you install an SD card into each camera. Then you can view the footage. Once the SD card fills up, oldest footage gets deleted. So either chose a less space gobbling recording setting, like 720 instead of 1080, and buy a 64Gb SD card.

Also, I found the cloud option with the subscription is very handy, and works well, however the amount of data uploaded was gigabytes from a little wind storm and decimated my data allowance on the internet account. So I bought a 128gb SD card to install in the camera. Doing this saves footage to the camera's SD card, no need for the cloud. So how much is the subscription? I am charged AUD$4.80 per month for one camera, AUD$8.99 for two cameras, and AUD$13 for 3 cameras per month. So AUD$107 for two cameras a year. It is a good camera, night vision is really good, so far they have not missed a beat... but with Alfred x camera I am paying AUD$45 a year for as many smart phones I can connect. With Imou I am essentially renting each camera. Yet for around $300, one off price, I could have bought some standalone cameras and a recorder... sigh.

For people that don't mind paying per month, Imou is a good system and offers a good service, or if you want to buy an SD card for each camera instead, then Imou becomes good value.

Pretty Darn Good – I had a Zosi 4 camera system but one camera failed and another camera lost its night vision so it was time to upgrade. I shopped high and low for a new system and ended up buying this one, I paid more because the brand is one of the top security cam systems in the world. Now , my problems started with fitting a hard drive to the NVR. Every time I… Read more

hooked it up the NVR went dead . I then decided to get in touch with the store and I new this was going to be a real trial in my communication skills. Luckily they responded the moment I posted my problem and seemed to know what I was talking about. The suggestion was to hook up the hard drive after I configured all the settings.

To be honest, this was the simplest setup i have undertaken with a security system. I plugged in all the cameras turned on the NVR and they paired immediately. Trouble is, I was getting an alarm telling me there was no hard drive. 3 drives later I dived into the setting to find that my hard drive was recognised as an sda media board and I was very reluctant to format that in case I wiped out the inbuilt firmware .

After some more fishing I found the NVR was telling me it was 1.83TB so , I guess it had to be my hard drive I pressed the format button and bingo the alarm stopped and after hooking the NVR to a wireless router it connected . I then installed the app on my smartphone and after a few minutes of configuration the cameras appeared on my app as well as the monitor screen I had hooked up to the NVR. I then installed the cameras outside and every thing worked . Great, so, alarms, worked detection worked, recording worked and the picture was great . No complaints and the quality is very good and highly recommended from me. I have included some photos of day vision and night vision, it may look like there is a light on in the night vision but that is only the heat coming from one of the cameras. The day vision shot was taken just as the sun was setting. Also a photo of the setup page which is very good and the best I have seen. the other shot of the monitor shows the 4 cameras and their vision, this unit will take up to 8 cameras so I guess if you needed ones with light activation you could buy those from the store. Your storage is limited to 8TB .

There are many other features that I will never use and I did test the audio but it gave a lot of feed back so I shut that off.

You may not want to pay the $400-$460 for a 4 camera system but in my opinion it is worth it to get the quality, the 4mp sensors really give a nice picture, the cameras are Ip67 waterproof, and the range , well, The furthest camera is 30 metres from my NVR through 2 brick walls and a plasterboard wall and it is delivering a strong picture. The unit also has repeater technology and I found it was set on auto but there is an option to do it manually. I might also mention that you get a choice of lenses with this system .I chose the 3.6mm and there is a 2.8mm as well. You will have to buy adapters for the plugs as they do not supply AU plugs.