UltraHD 4K (8MP) Outdoor Security IP Turret PoE Camera, 3840x2160, 98ft NightVision, 125° FOV, IP67 Weatherproof, MicroSD Recording (256GB), IP8M-T2599EW-AI-V3 (White)

I own two of these and use them with Blue Iris. The software integration is simple and has been very reliable. Streaming rate is adequate for 15 fps on both main and sub stream. Image quality is excellent during the day, and seems to be very good during the night, but that is deceptive: the clear static picture you see is achieved at the expense of massive smoothing of the pixelated image. This becomes apparent whenever anyone walks through the field of view at night, all you see is a "comet" with a blob for the face and a blurry tail. I tried to experiment with the amount of 3D and 2D smoothing that the web interface provides, but to achieve realistic motion capture in the dark I had to sacrifice image quality so much that the pixelation and digital noise made the image unusable anyway. Long exposure mode showed promise but I had to extend the exposure to the point of reaching the frame rate, and also had trouble having the camera switch between night and day mode. That resulted in the long exposure mode extending into daylight, saturating the sensor and whiting out the image. The IR illumination only seems to blur the image instead of making it better, so I turned it off. Note that the camera is not even in a particularly dark area, there are 4 garage night lights lighting up the driveway that it is looking at. So that is a little disappointing. But that said, my other brand of consumer camera that starts with R performs more or less the same in the dark, and much worse in all other aspects with Blue Iris, so I will not complain. But take the "starlight" label on the box with a grain of salt. You probably need a $700 camera for that to be true. The second one I have looks at an area under a street light. That one is doing better at night, which makes me think that the IR from the street lamp helps it a lot (the garage lights are LED, so they probably are lacking in the IR range). So if you stick with these cameras, you may want to add a dedicated IR illuminator over the area it is looking at. During daylight this camera is great. The mic works fine. I wish it had field curvature correction in the firmware as the FOV is very distorted on the edges due to the wide angle. Alas, you don't get that at this price point. Overall I like these cameras and recommend them to people using Blue Iris.

I’ve used many IP cameras, and by far this one is my favorite. This product has strong metal housing, and is great overall quality. I use Blue Iris through my computer as my NVR, and Blue Iris identifies the cameras at 8.3MP which is even a little higher than the advertised 8MP which is great! The picture is crystal clear, and the user interface on the device webpage is very straightforward. Pros: • High quality image • Easy to set up • Amcrest didn’t lock the software for this camera like their competitors do, which means you can use just about any third-party camera software instead of being forced to pay for cloud services, which they do sell but don’t make your camera a useless brick if you don’t pay the extra. • PoE works as expected, but the separate power option works well if you don’t have a PoE switch. • The view is wider than many competitors. This was a major win for this camera. • The night vision is good enough to IR blast my whole front of my driveway and lawn to the street, and you can even make out the neighbor’s house across the street– I wouldn’t say quite 164 feet, but I know that number may be for a specific environment to reach its rating. Cons: • I’ve tested the camera with Alexa with the skill that works for the camera, and it worked a couple times, and then didn’t work a couple times. I don’t entirely blame Amcrest for this one because a lot of Alexa camera apps aren’t working correctly with Alexa yet. Hopefully this will change in the future, but it’s not really a big deal.

Image: 10/10 The image is crystal clear 4k sharp. Amcrest's image quality is exceptional. During the day you can see all the details (face, license plate, etc) with great clarity. The night vision is excellent if you make some adjustments in the software depending on where it is installed. It is not recommended to leave these settings in default to obtain the best possible quality. I have several Amcrest cameras and not all of them have the same night vision settings. Motion detection: 9/10 After making the corresponding adjustments, I can say that the motion detection of this camera is very good. Amcrest's app notification system keeps me updated on events in real time. During the night the motion detection is another story. I had to make various settings adjustments to avoid or reduce false positives. Where I live there are many bugs and this greatly affects night detection. Need a smart face/ car detection. Features: 9.5/10 Amcrest has many settings available that facilitate control, image quality, networking, events, etc. As I mentioned these cameras require adjustments to get the best result. Amcrest allows you to have profiles for day and night which makes it easy to have two separate options and thus obtain a quality that would be impossible with the default settings. It is important to fine tune settings like BLC mode, Anti-dither, etc. Hardware Quality: 10/10 The quality of these cameras is excellent, I already have experience with these cameras and none have given me problems for years. I live in the tropics and the average temperatures do not drop below 90 and now in the summer they were 105. I am confident that by buying these cameras I will not have any problems with the environmental conditions where I live. It is a well built and designed camera that for the price cannot be beaten. Customer Service: 10/10 Amcrest customer service has always resolved me quickly and given me specific help to be able to fix situations or understand the terms of all the adjustments. I couldn't be happier that I chose Amcrest for my home security. General: 9.7/10 Camera setup was extremely easy, and the image quality is amazingly crystal clear and sharp. I have recommended it to friends and family and they are all equally satisfied with the quality of these cameras. I used the AMCPFB204W Wall Mount Bracket for a complete and solid installation. Motion detection at night is where I've had a hard time making adjustments to the software and not getting a lot of false positives which makes it a bit annoying. Smart detection needs improvement for better control and no unwanted notifications. I highly recommend Amcrest.

The picture quality can be adjusted downward for higher video frame rates. But the image is noticeably "fisheyed" to get a wider image. The night vision is excellent and the microphone is super sensitive, but without much noise. I could not even find the microphone and it sometimes picks up wind noise. So a better windscreen is on the wish list. Keep this in mind if you want to mount it anywhere in the wind. Another downside is that it has to be taken apart to be hard reset, and that always raises questions about future water resistance. One needs to be very careful about the wiring when one puts it back together. Your best bet is to never need to do a hardware reset. POE works as advertised over a 50ft cable (just make sure you buy a cable that specifically says it can handle POE. But I noticed the whole unit tends to get a bit warm during operation. So in cold weather, there is a small chance that a bird might find it a useful perch, with all that this implies. And for reference, of the three lenses on the face, the little tiny one should be on the bottom for the picture to be upside right. Even so, there's a software setting to rotate the image by 1 degree increments to get it perfectly straight and level for all you perfectionists out there. I can't praise the night vision enough. It far exceeded my expectations. The image clarity, though black and white, is amazing for distant objects as well as close up. The reflective surfaces on a school bus (for instance) shine brightly at 40 feet away, so it's impossible to miss. But I can also hear a vehicle on the road long before it comes into view. Despite what the literature says, Mozilla Firefox (as of version 82.0.2) handles the web address without any plug-in required. I can watch and configure the camera right from Firefox with no problems at all, with no special setup required. Just find the IP address and type it into the address bar directly. Until you change it, both the username and password is "admin". It immediately wants you to change the password, and the 8 digit minimum requirement is annoying. But since it connects via Ethernet, it automatically appears as an "other device" in Windows 10 file explorer under "network devices". From there, you can simply click on it and it should open in your default browser. So there's 2 ways to access the camera via PC with no fuss or muss. It's even easier than installing any special software on a smartphone.

I really hoped spending extra for Amcrest would be worth it, as their online demo software seemed competent. I've owned over 30 networked cams over the last decade, and this one is more frustrating than any cheap Foscam or Xiaomi from China. * The instructions say the QR code is on the bottom of the camera, but it isn't. After 15 minutes of searching, I found an Amazon review that mentioned the QR code is on a sticker on the power cord. Indeed it is -- and very tiny. How could Amcrest's own docs, app, and web site all fail to mention this? Colossal quality-assurance fail! Do they even try their own setup flow? * Setup got stuck at the mandatory change-password step. This step gave error messages multiple times, and never said it succeeded, but at some point the built-in password started failing, so then I tried the new password and finally got to a live screen. * In any screen where you examine settings, you get a save/cancel dialog even if you've changed nothing. This is such a noob rookie UX fail. Sloppy. * The app randomly and repeatedly says failed to connect. Same thing even if I switch from my 150' POE ethernet cable to a 4' test cable. Other times it will work fine. The other devices I have ethernet'd to this particular Eero unit never have such problems. * If you can catch the camera in a good mood and it decides to show up on the network, good luck trying to access its UI in Chrome. I had already installed the Amcrest Web View Chrome app, and was impressed by the demo cameras Amcrest runs live next to some dumpster somewhere. But when I try to connect to my cam using the IP revealed by Amcrest IP ConfigTool, no joy. Mostly the UI just times out ("site can't be reached, took too long to respond"). One time the login screen loaded, but it just hung after I entered my username and password (which are known to sometimes work in the android app). I'm hesitant to try deploying this flaky cam outside at its intended location. If it's as flaky out there as it is in my living room, then there's no point in even trying, and I should return it now. Not sure what I'll do. Very disappointed -- and very scared, because I have the 25X optical-zoom Amcrest cam on order. If it's as bad as this one, I'll have to return both. Update: returned this flaky camera, and canceled the fancy 25X expensive Amcrest. Customer support was pretty much non-existent.

In the process of setting up a new surveillance system and testing various software packages and cameras, I bought this 4K camera to be one of the main cameras overlooking my driveway. As soon as I pulled it from the box, I was impressed with how solid it felt. Its base is solid metal and seems like it should hold up to whatever nature throws at it. Aiming the camera is also quite easy since it is not enclosed inside a dome. One Torx screw is all it takes to adjust, and a Torx wrench is conveniently provided in the box. Now, I should disclose that I do have a background in IT, so I promptly ignored all of the software that it came with and set it up by going to the camera's web interface. Therefore, I can't attest to how their bundled software performs. Once I had the camera set up on my network, I was then able to link the camera to the various software I was testing (Blue Iris, Milestone and Zoneminder) quite easily without any fuss at all. It just worked, and the picture quality was great! The camera's web interface was pretty straight forward and felt very similar to some other cheap Anpviz cameras I was testing, so not much to say there. In the end, I ended up settling on Blue Iris for my software package and setting up this camera with a substream to save some CPU. Using the h.265 encoding cut back on my bitrate substantially over h.264 and the quality seemed great with either. The only annoyance I had during the entire setup, installation, and configuration of this camera was in the use of the substream in Blue Iris. Basically, when switching from table view to full screen, there was an enormous delay of about 30-45 seconds before it would switch over to the 4K stream. After quite a while of Google searching, which didn't help much, I ended up manually tracing the issue back to the Smart Codec on the main stream of the camera. Disabling the Smart Codec, completely removed the delay and all has been great since. From what I found online, Smart Codec is supposed to help reduce bandwidth consumption, but in my testing, I did not see any difference with it turned on versus turned off. Other than the Smart Codec giving me some grief, my only other (very slight) complaint, is that the IR illumination at night isn't as bright as some of the other cameras I was testing. I am, however, trying to cover a rather large area with the camera though, so it likely wouldn't be an issue in most cases. In my case, I will soon be adding an IR illuminator to help brighten things up.

About a year ago, we purchased an Amcrest doorbell camera. It's been a great investment, so we decided to try this Amcrest security camera. It is well packaged, and the camera appears to be good quality with the housing and outer shell cast made of aluminum. It comes with a template on a sticker so you can easily place it in your desired camera location and drill right through the sticket template. It has four screw holes and one center hole for the wiring. The camera has one power input and one POE (ethernet) input (which can also provide power). The power supply is not included if you need to power the unit with the power port, otherwise you will need a POE switch or POE router. We found a 4 port POE switch on Amazon for only $20 which was plug & play, no setup required. I should also note that if you are also using the switch with non-POE devices, some of the extremely cheap POE switches cannot determine if you are plugging in a POE device or any other device which does not require power, so make sure that the one you get has auto detecting if you want to keep things simple. One ethernet from the router to the switch, then you can have four cameras fed off of the switch. Setting up the app was pretty straight forward, other than the directions stating that the serial number & QR code was typically on the back of the camera, which it was not. After a phone call with tech support, he insisted it was there somewhere. I found that it was actually on a sticker, wrapped around the wire, quite a few inches away from the camera. This portion of the wire happened to already be stuffed up through the hole in the soffit, but once I found it and scanned the QR code, setup took minutes. The picture quality in 4k far exceeded my expectation. You also have the option to digitally zoom/pan quite a bit before major degredation. The night vision is pretty good as well. Our driveway is about 60ft. long and there is enough infrared light to show a clear picture up to about 40-50ft. out. The best feature is the push notifications to the app for events such as motion or sound detection. You can easily set the dead zones to prevent false alarms. The microphone seems to pick up sounds very well, although I've only tried it out a couple of times. We have used the basic cloud service on the doorbell in addition to storing on the SD card, but we have not setup the cloud service on the turret camera yet, instead we’re just using an SD card. I should also note, if other cameras are added, the app allows simultaneous viewing of multiple cameras with the ability to fill the screen with just one. If you prefer, Amcrest also offers an app for PC which can do it all, as well as some 3rd party software that can also be used. On the negative side of things.... The motion detection at night using infrared seems to only pick up motion up to about 25'. There are some adjustments for the sensitivity, but I haven't been able to sense motion beyond 25' yet. I couldn't find an in-depth user guide for the Amcrest View Pro app which details all features, only a handful of guides showing a handful of features which is found in the support area of Amcrest's website. The app is fairly clean, but could use some work. A lot of Amcrest's other cameras use the same app, so for a camera like this with fewer features, the app still shows the buttons for the more advanced features which other cameras would use. I feel like these should at the very least be grayed out. After using the app for a short time, you get used to which items are available and which are not. In reality, once you get things setup the way you want, you really don't do a lot on the app. When a clip is recorded to your phone, your frame rate is limited by your internet connection. A 4k recording may output only a frame every few seconds if you are not on your home network, making the recorded video very choppy. You can choose to send the files or export to view on a computer. For some reason, when clips are exported, the delay between frames is removed, so you get all the frames quickly one after another right away, then the remaining time is just the last frame on the screen, so something is off there. Keep in mind, this is only when you click the record button on the app, not when events are recorded straight to the cameras SD card. My biggest complaint is that there are three main subcategories to view live video, saved video/pics, and recorded events. On the live view screen, there is no shortcut to view any recorded video, events, or pictures. In order to view automatically recorded video from a triggered event, you have to click the menu, find "push notifications", "event list", then choose which event to view. However, once you are on the screen and viewing your recorded events, there are shortcuts at the top to switch to snapped pictures, and live video feed. It would be nice to have them all accessible anywhere in the app. It seems like a lot of work to get to your recordings. I should also point out that the Amcrest smarthome app does have shortcuts to your recordings from the live video feed, which works really well. Both apps are very different, and I'd assume the Amcrest cloud app is also different. All in all, it's a great camera and easy to get used to once you run through the app front to back a few times.

The camera is exactly as described; no guess work with the picture quality. Mounting the hardware was also a breeze. There are four mount points on the base of the camera, so it'll do a nice job grabbing ahold of anything it is anchored to. Software Setup was incredibly easy. I don't have an Amcrest setup, so I used the Amcrest View Pro android app to interface with it on my phone. Connecting with the web interface was even easier. I didn't spend too much time on the app, but the local camera settings are full featured and I really didn't notice anything missing that I'd want to play with. Regarding power, I measured consumption using a unifi switch and saw ranged from 3.06W - 6.10W with and without IR. Network Transfer: I cranked the settings on the highest settings and left the encode to x264. On the network, I saw a consistent 1280 KB/s. When I connected remotely, the camera did a nice job adjusting to a lower data rate. One thing that I did not test was motion detection or recording. I think the biggest thing that stood out was the zoom. The image attached is a screenshot using my phone because you cannot natively take a picture of a zoomed-in picture with the Amcrest View Pro App. Comparing the wide angle (without the fisheye look) coupled with the zoom, this picture is absolutely incredible. The audio is also really good. I have a Unifi G3 Pro, I wouldn't say it's as good as that camera (it's stellar), but the mic is still really good. I can hear conversation from my driveway at normal voices. So still really, really good. All in all, a fantastic camera with a superb image. If I had to point to anything negative, it's the Amcrest software; It's available on Windows / OSX, but not linux. I installed it, but took a while to get everything configured. Not a dealbreaker since you can use Amcrest cams with 3rd party nvr software like Blue Iris and Zoneminder, but the review of 5 stars is specifically for this camera. Definitely worth a strong consideration for anyone looking at Amcrest for their surveillance needs.