The kit PKD-DK0865-NHD includes an 8 CH H.264 standalone DVR and eight night vision outdoor security cameras.
$ 199.99
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3 Comments on “Zmodo Surveillance System with 8 Weatherproof IR Cameras PKD-DK0865-(No Hard Drive)”
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Good System, Great Value – Highly Recommended,
This Zmodo Surveillance System works well for my needs and is also a great deal at $200 and Prime shipping (at the time of this review). To be perfectly clear, this is not a high-end system with high definition cameras, but it isn’t priced like a high-end system either. This is a budget system that exceeded my expectations for what you get and how well it works. Here are my observations:
Our Use – We recently bought an old but very large building for my wife’s business and needed a way to monitor the six exits and the retail shop space.
Included:
* Main Control Unit – this is a fairly small unit (smaller than most DVD players) that is has button access for most functions
* 8-Cameras – these are also fairly small, good physical quality and include mounting hardware
* USB Mouse – connects to Control Unit
* Remote Control – gives access to all menu functions (batteries included)
* Required Cables – 60′ Video/Power cables
* Power Supplies – one for the Control Unit and two for the cameras (uses splitters to distribute the power between the cameras)
* Instruction Manual
* Software CD
* Hard Drive Mounting Screws (Hard Drive not included)
Features:
+ Camera; IR Illumination for night vision
+ User configurable Options; Privacy Zones (blackout areas in the display), Motion Zones (areas where motion triggers an alarm)
+ Network Access; Can be viewed on local network using Internet Explorer (required allowing ActiveX and would not work with Firefox) and remotely via a DDNS service (often an extra expense for a reliable service)
+ Alarm Notification; Audible alert and E-Mail capability
+ Display Options; Includes a VGA monitor connection and BNC/video out for TV viewing (we use Q-See QSRCBN6 6 Pack RCA-BNC Connectors)
+ Remote Control; Really makes it easy to quickly access features
Pros:
+ Setup; Basic configuration is surprisingly easy
+ Image Quality; Good enough for basic security needs in both bright and dark settings (but see “Cons” below)
+ Value; Lots of cameras and features at a reasonable cost
+ Options; Can be made to do everything we need it to do
Cons:
– No Hard Drive; Can use external USB drive or add your own Hard Drive to add recording capabilities (we installed Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive – WD5000AAKX in less than ten minutes)
– Washed Out Colors; Colors are somewhat muted, but can be individually adjusted in the controls to get the best possible picture for the lighting conditions
– Night Vision; Limited range, less than 20′
Hints/Notes:
* With the Hard Drive installed, Alarmed Events can be recorded and searched on later
* A 500GB Hard Drive can record 168 hours of video (according to the manual)
* Placing a camera too close to a window will cause the IR to reflect and blind the camera when it shifts into night vision mode
* Display can be set to show 1, 4, or 8 video feeds at a time
This system covered my needs very well and provides a lot of advanced features that were unexpected in a budget system.
Highly Recommended!
CFH
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|Good product for the money,
Simple to hookup. Plenty of cameras. Lots of options to monitor. Quality seems good (everythings from China). The manual can be a little hard to read and lacking, but it covers the basics.
You get 8 cameras. Daytime range and color is good. IR range at night is pretty limited, maybe 20 feet. If you are just covering a door or hallway it works pretty well. I have one in the garage and you couldn’t see much of anything at night without an extra illuminator and a couple more outside for the driveway and yard area and they are completely useless at night. Probably need to supplement with a motion light or some other means.
The DVR comes without a HD. I added a 500GB, which was a simple task. The user interface is adequate and simple enough to figure out. There are two BNC type video outputs. I got some adapter plugs from Monoprice to convert to a RCA type plug so I could plug into a TV input. It also comes with software that you can install on your computer to monitor the DVR remotely over your home network. That works really nice and lets you make all the adjustments to the DVR settings from any networked computer without having to be connected directly to the DVR (except for the first time setup of course). Not much for instructions on how to use the s/w though, so you have to wing it on your own.
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|Bad model – avoid,
I own five Zmodo units working in different buildings for 2+ years, so after one of my evicted tenants decided to steal it, this was the best price I could find. After we tried to install two different hard drives (WD and Seagate, both 500GB), we discovered that this particular DVR model (D9108BH) has one fatal flaw: it doesn’t recognize a hard drive after a hard restart. Apparently, when a power is lost during HDD writing operations, the file system is messed up to such a degree that the operating system is incapable of dealing with this mess. Power goes down every week in S. Florida, so we cannot afford to dismantle the unit and reformat the hard drive in a computer every time it happens. We returned it.
Some thoughts to share with those who may consider purchasing a similar system:
1) As far as my experience with other, older units is concerned: they need to be connected via a surge protector because otherwise they die very quickly, being very sensitive to voltage fluctuations. We have them all hooked via UPS, so a thief wouldn’t benefit from a simple act of switching the power off.
2) Cameras have a random short life, and the quality of picture deteriorates significantly in the first two months (which you discover when you replace those which died, and compare pictures from new and old cameras). We have to replace 10{fa0f407a56ebf26e8755ec9e145523374db89e13015bb27dc750b111d8cc035c} of cameras every year.
3) Cables are of poor quality, they need to be tested before installation and treated like a rotten egg during installation. Make sure you install them in the right direction – check the power plugs before you install, they are different on two sides! Don’t cover them until the system is tested, because at the end there is always at least one cable that doesn’t work and needs to be re-wired. The connectors are prone to corrosion, and they loose electrical connection in a matter of months, so most service calls boil down to cleaning the cable connections.
4) The setup of the DVR unit is as counter-intuitive as it gets. What we normally need is a silent system that would record video for several seconds from those cameras which detected motion, while watching all the time. Sounds simple? You won’t find it in the manual, and it’s not the default configuration in most of these units. Some settings overlap in different menus of the setup, and you never know which one overrides the other.
5) Manuals are seldom pertinent to the model they came with, and they don’t address the normal setup issues we normally see.
6) Sound. We hide the DVRs in inaccessible locations, to prevent stealing them by thieves, so one more inherent flaw of all of them is the buzzer which goes off whenever anything happens: a camera was disconnected, power was connected, etc. The only way to silence the buzzer is to physically destroy it with pliers – I am not kidding, we have already tried all menu options with Zmodo support. The buzzer is sometimes well-hidden inside the front panel mainboard.
7) Hard drives tend to overheat in those units which do not have fans.
8) Most units come without hard drives; however, you may have a hard time finding any disclosure of the fact prior to the purchase.
9) Once something happens, you would probably need to convert the video files i.e. in the convenient AVI format. With the software Zmodo provided, It takes half a day to convert these video files into any common format, and it is very inflexible, and doesn’t support batching files.
We overcome all the technical difficulties, because we have boxes full of replacement cameras and cables from several units which died, and we spent enough time with the Zmodo tech support (average waiting time 20-30 minutes – nice folks), to learn how to set it up.
One major advantage of having a surveillance system is recording criminal activity, which is quite common in Liberty City, where they are installed. The video is not of good quality but it can tell you, what items the perpetrators touched, so the fingerprints theoretically could be taken from these items in order to identify the thieves, (if the police ever cared to take the fingerprints). I.e. in our case, we had half-an-hour footage of the theft of the AC unit, where one of the thieves unscrewed a light bulb in front of one of the cameras. The trouble was, the police (NW Miami Dade) took two weeks to arrive to collect fingerprints (which were gone by then) and they disregarded the video, which we converted for them into the convenient AVI format (this is another issue – it takes half a day to convert these video files into any common format with the software Zmodo provided). The police officer in charge of the case did not know how (or did not want?) to open AVI video files, so they have never even tried to use them to solve the case. We printed and posted fliers containing the best still pictures (surprisingly good, including tatoos on the bodies) captured from these videos, and one of our…
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