IPC-T54IR-ZE S3

Ok - so I did a lot of online research on security cameras prior to this purchase. My requirements were large sensor, clear image, robust housing as well as easy to install and manage. I also wanted them to be budget friendly and these cameras ticked all my boxes. The purchase and delivery was flawless. I had one support question, which the Empire Tech team responded to almost instantly and I was up and running. NB: These are proper ONVIF compatible cameras and connected to my Blue Iris management server easily with zero fuss or bother. These cameras are low-light capable and require some minimal illumination source for best performance at night. They "do not" work in zero light situations. They "do not" have internal LED lights or IR illuminators. They come with a static IP address and if your subnet is different, they won't show up when doing an IP subnet scan. You may need to use the camera config tool to find them on your network and change the default IP address.

I had a couple Wyze cams and was looking for something a bit more capable and not tied to wireless. After some research I found Empire Tech and bought the IPC-T5442T-ZE, a PoE IP camera. As you can see in the photo, night clarity is phenomenal! The scene is lit almost entirely by the cameras' IR lighting, just a bit of LED light from a security lamp mounted well beyond the left side corner of the house. Andy, the owner of Empire Tech, personally answered a couple questions I had, responding very quickly helping me get the setup dialed in. Nice to know there is excellent, responsive customer support behind my purchase. In addition, shipping was very fast, two days after order the camera was in my hands. As I get further into my setup, I'm looking forward to purchasing more equipment from Empire Tech. I highly recommend Andy and Empire Tech!

This is a fairly inexpensive camera, but don't let that fool you. The low-light performance is amazing. You really can get good images at night with no other illumination other than a partial moon. With a full moon out, it's super crisp and clear with well-defined shadows. It can see better in the dark than I can, at least. I added an external IR illuminator to keep bugs away. A cheap illuminator covers my very large front yard and makes a clear image at night. It has built-in IR, but I don't use that. I used the varifocal lens to dial in my exact field of view that I needed. Easy as can be. The mount is petty sturdy and simple. I connected it via PoE.

WARNING this camera has a steeeeeeep learning curve! Changed from 2 stars to 3 only because of amazing video quality. I hope this can help others save time on set up.! Video quality: amazing Sound quality: untested HOWEVER it has the ability to begin recording due to a sound trigger- aka barking dogs, music, bad neighbors, etc.. Water lens issues: 0/ 8 months I bought this camera for animal event recording aka to record animals specifically for better IR night recording. 6 months after install and countless trials and errors and I can now share how to set up and use animal IVS! During initial set up disable Acu pick, enable IVS, set up either trip wire or intrusion by drawing the target trigger recording zone directly in the field of view. In the IVS web GUI (web browser IP access) enable record on the same page as the target parameters. Enable “animal/pet” and disable “vehicle” and “human” or leave these enabled. Do not set min/max target sizes and leave as default In separate windows of the web UI Look for the video recording schedule that shows “event, alarm, & General” recording schedules and disable the general recording. There will be one more area in a different window where general/normal recording needs to be disabled. If these changes have been made and it still isn’t working then there is an option to reboot the camera setting, within the web browser UI, while saving the network and user information. There is also an option to clear the cache via the DMSS app. Update after (4) months of trial and error I finally figured out that the PET/animal sensing trigger is elusive (using motion detection and SMD not IVS). However if you somehow have it working and want to get notifications go In the DMSS app camera settings “messages” must be set to “receive notifications and send messages” and then the “alarm message type” option will appear!!! Now you can activate the “motion detection” and “Smart Motion Detection” which will give the option of activating “pet, human, vehicle”. This SMD setting does not exist on the PC remote interface under event SMD triggers. For IVS notifications the “tripwire” or “intrusion” needs to be enabled. Next under “remote configuration” there is “alarm function” in which “motion detection” and “SMD” can now be activated! I eventually FINALLY got the camera paired to my network and it is up and running... WHY did i put so much time and effort into this camera? I am hoping that it will have better IR night video recording because I am beyond fed up with poor quality granular video. So after a lot of troubleshooting and days upon days of torture and wanting to give up I have finally got the camera up and running for my testing quality control check. I am eager to see the quality of video produced by the night IR. The IR and animal detection were the two main factors that drew me to this camera... in addition to the rest of the tech specs. This Camera is not for anyone who can't troubleshoot their home LAN and computer IP networking and or quickly learn how to do these tasks. This camera requires a lot of user input and it is not at all a one size fits all plug and play entry level camera. ⚠️⛔️⚠️⛔️ Software Incompatibility⛔️⚠️⛔️ Setting up a home camera shouldn’t require a masters degree in home networking and computer software! what a horrific mental exercise/ nightmare. ⚠️#1. This camera dare I say all Dahua cameras are not plug and play capable? I really can’t say! This camera is not for the casual consumer. What that means is that you either need to have an NVR, NVS+ software, or your PC + CCTV software like ispy or similar software up and running. ⛔️⛔️⛔️ You can not take this camera out of the box and plug it all in for bench testing by using the app to set it up. The owners manual says that you can use the app to set up (initialize) and view but this simply is not true. Reolink on the other hand does in fact offer for a fast and easy user plug and play app initialization and usage but crud for video footage quality. I was really hoping for that same easy straight forward UI with this brand but it just isn’t there! Despite the ridiculous videos showing easy plug and play set up via the app without needing a PC or NVR... it just isn't true! Having a direct hard wired Ethernet connection to initialize this camera to work on my home network is 100% necessary! Trying to get this camera up and operational without the NVR has been a nightmare because…… I couldn’t download the Dahua Configuration software, which is a direct door into initializing the camera in order to view it in the app! Why couldn’t I download the Dahua software? Because my desktop computer was incompatible with the software so I bought a newer desktop computer except then I hit another incompatible message saying that I need to update the web browser but I couldn’t do that without updating software which I couldn’t do without upgrading to an external hard drive…. So to recap the only way you can get into the camera is by hooking it up to the proprietary NVR, a computer running new software (less than 5 years old) and downloading the Dahua config tool, using an NVS+ operations software, or PC + operations software. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to use the app to initialize and set up the cameras. Unfortunately I have run out of time to keep messing with chasing all of the bugs down with this cameras software incompatibility issues and I need to send it back before my 30 day return window closes. I wasted countless days on this camera and its software and chasing issues. I opened up the Reo link POI and it just worked flawlessly via the app so if you want an easy reliable user interface and don’t really care about video quality Then reolink is the better option. UPDATE: So 24+ hours of non stop troubleshooting and I have the Dahua config tool downloaded and I am able to see that the camera was initialized via the app however.... it still gives me the error message that it can't connect to cloud or connect via IP config error message and there was zero prompt to format the memory card. overall the reolink I bought at the same time as this camera took less than 2 minutes to plug in and get live video. I am still at this.. so with the camera plugged into 12v power and an Ethernet plugged into the desktop then disconnect desktop from internet. Go into desktop network IPV4 settings and set to manual input ip address 192.168.1.100 and subnet mask 255.255.255.0 and this will finally allow for the camera to get initialized by either the config tool or simply input the cameras factory configured IP address into a web browser. You will be able to access the cameras system via the hard wired Ethernet connection and the web browser even without internet! I am still figuring this out and no owners manual or anything else to help. It’s patching all of this together painfully! Next (using config tool) go into “modify IP” click “DHCP” If the camera disappears from config tool or web browser. I disconnected from desktop and hooked back into my PoE switch that is connected directly to to router and used the DMSS to do a “search on LAN” to see the new IP addressed assigned to the camera. Boom now it is connected… to my home network 🙈🤣.. Saga To be continued… I still need to configure camera settings and get it paired with the DMSS app. So I bought this because it is supposed to have animal detection event triggering for recording. I have yet to find anything that even remotely resembles this ability. I downloaded and did the firmware update.. I will probably do a factory reset because nothing with this camera is what it should be! I keep thinking that maybe the quality of video will be worth all of this hassle but then I look at the ridiculously antiquated user interface platform and it’s just dismal… like looking at DOS. Online guides and tutorials don’t work because Dahua decided to change their web browser UI so it doesn’t even match up with the manuals and guides. NEXT setting tripwire/ intrusion mode (one not both), format memory card, set up event motion detection, and sit back and see how well it can get night IR video!!!!! Day time video is just amazing looking but most cameras do best in day and struggle at night. I have excess night pollution from a church directly in front of my house which washes all white light cameras and prevents them from being able to trigger and record at night time unless i create an equal amount of white light pollution so.... fingers crossed this works! 💔 so the camera night IR is amazing.. in fact all of the video quality is as I had hoped and expected and is just amazing. The software on the other hand is pretty bad. So the Smart plan aka AI IVS settings aka human, vehicle, and animal detection tripwire event triggers keep disappearing from my web UI platform and thus the camera isn’t capturing the triggering events. This was happening because if you click on “global” and initialize “long distance” then it deactivates the Target field under the tripwire.

Excellent day and night vision. Setting up was a bit of a challenge with my Hikvision NVR compared to the plug-and-play Hikvision cameras that I have used in the past but the gain was definitely worth the pain. The seller offered helpful advice for making adjustments for contrast in light and dark conditions. I get good color images at night most of the time on one of the three cameras I bought. I still have work to do on the other two but hope to get there soon. The color images at night offer so much more visual clarity than the black and white images.

This is always my go-to camera for most outdoor installs. It's nightime quality is amazing and the ability to fine the zoom for what I need is my favorite. The build quality is what you would expect from this price point of cameras. It's solid. My only issue that I don't have enough of them. I bought this in 2021 and it's still running strong. Zero issues in a very hot, rainy climate. If you need a camera for an exterior install that looks nice on the exterior of the house then this is the camera I would always go with.