Sansco 4 Channel NVR Security Camera DVR System Review
Buy it at Amazon: Sansco 4 Channel NVR Security Camera DVR System [Affiliate Link]
Takeaway: Good quality hi-res video, mobile app for remote viewing and image/video capture.
You'll receive the NVR unit, 2 each of the bullet cameras, mounting hardware packs, video and power cable, and A/C adapters, a 4 to 1 power cable adapter, a USB mouse, a software CD, a RS-485 PTZ jumper, and a pair of quick setup guides. The NVR unit has a 1 TB 3.5" SATA Toshiba hard drive pre-installed inside (I opened it to verify). On the back of the unit are 4 coaxial inputs for up to 4 cameras (the unit only comes with 2), an RCA audio out, HDMI out , VGA out port, 4 audio RCA inputs for cameras that support audio, Ethernet port, 2 USB ports, RS-485 port for PTZ (w/compatible cameras), and DC power port. On the front are the menu selection keys, menu button, escape button, status LEDs, and IR receiver for a remote control, though one is not included.
The bodies of the cameras are body made of powder coated metal and durable for weather-resistance for outdoor installations. Each camera has 36 infrared LEDs surrounding the lens for night vision. Coming off the back are two cables for the power and video feed. These will connect to the 50 ft cables so you can run the wires across rooms, through walls and to different floors of your home if necessary. The camera can pivot 180 degrees on a single joint and rotate 360 for positioning and orientation, but you'll need the small Allen wrench in the hardware pack to set the angle. Make sure you loosen the joints fully before modifying the position because the teeth on the gears seem very shallow and may strip with excessive grinding.
Setup is basically plug and play. You plug the cameras into the cables, hooks them up to the NVR (cables are clearly marked which end goes where) then supply power to the NVR and the cameras. The camera power cables go into the 4 to 1 adapter and uses a single A/C adapter for all of them. Once plugged in the cameras are all swithed on. There is no power switch on them. One thing to note is that when watching the feeds on a TV, even at 1080p resolution that what you see on the screen is slightly degraded quality than the actual video file if you were to pull them off the NVR and watch them on a computer. The included cameras' native output resolution is HD at 720p although the system is capable of handling up to 1080p output. Because the resolution is 720p and not higher, the images can still be somewhat blurry and you may not be able to make out fine details when something is moving. The colors are somewhat washed out and the contrast is a bit too harsh. You can play with these settings on the NVR but I didn't find that the overall quality changes much. The infrared lights allow you to see everything in the dark as if it were daytime, even in pitch black conditions, however, everything will be in black and white. Outdoor color reproduction isn't that great, with blown out areas in bright sun, strong contrast, and faded colors. However, when used indoors with indirect daytime lighting, the color accuracy seemed pretty good and the contrast looks normal. With 2 cameras 30 mins for recorded footage takes up about 1 GB (based on backup file sizes) so the hard drive can save about 21 days worth of footage before overwriting the oldest files. With 4 cameras you'll be able to save about 10 days worth of video.
If your system is connected to your home network, you can also download the Android or iOS app, XMEye, for remote viewing on a mobile device. The app requires you to sign up for an account if you want to use it remotely from anywhere with an internet connection, but this is not required for local network viewing. After adding the NVR to the list of devices, you'll be able to see the live camera feeds on your phone. You can view one camera at a time and save the footage and capture images in real-time or view all the cameras at once.
Overall, the security camera system is simple to set up and use. Checking on the cameras from the main unit and mobile app is easy to do, as is retrieving saved video files and backing them up to a USB thumb drive or hard drive. Just note that the video files are encoded with a *.h264 extension and you'll need an appropriate viewer to watch the files. I used AVC to convert the videos the MP4s and that quadrupled the file size.
Buy it at Amazon: Sansco 4 Channel NVR Security Camera DVR System [Affiliate Link]
