2MP CCTV System

I bought this 2 years ago and its been one of the best investments I've made for my house and I'll detail why below, but before that a few things to note. Installing this wasn't straightforward and putting up 8 cameras and associated cable routing isn't easy for the basic DIYer. - You'll need some tools and a ladder and you'll need to think about how the cameras and cables will attach and be routed outside and inside your house. - The cables are long (in some cases probably a bit too long) but for some houses they may not be long enough - measure and plan. - You need quite a few plugs where you are going locate the unit (I ended up needing 6) - You'll need some additional hardware (either using an existing TV or a dedicated monitor, plus a cheap mouse and keyboard). - You'll need to get the cables inside (I drilled a hole through the wall of my home office - you can go via loft but be mindful of length of cable you'll need) - You'll need to consider how you attach to your router as it doesn't have wifi. That said you can probably find someone to do it all for you and advise, and the cost of fitting will still be cheaper than some of the other systems. I did it myself so I saved. One point to make as I have had 2 years is the hard drive broke last month. Whether this was the consequence of a knock (it fell off a shelf onto the floor) or whether it just corrupted through heavy use, I'm not sure, but for £50 I got a replacement drive, reattached and it was working fine again. A bit annoying but for the sake of the benefits I had no issues replacing. This is on 24/7 so its it has a shelf life. Now onto the benefits: 1) it works as a deterrent in a lot of situations - the night I put it up, i caught someone trying to steal my car on the drive. They saw the CCTV and scarpered. Have had several occasions where this has happened since. It doesn't stop someone breaking in, but it is an additional deterrent. If you think of the percentage of opportunist burglars there are likely to be; a lot of them will see the CCTV and give it a miss. The most determined will still go for it, but that is a percentage of the opportunists, so you are reducing the overall odds of break in. There are a little red ring of lights around the camera so these criminals will be looking out for signs of cameras. 2) you can access the feed and recordings anywhere - the app is pretty good and you can watch live from where ever you are in the world as long as you have signal to your phone and your internet is working. I got asked by a neighbour on holiday if something had come up on CCTV, and I find the evidence and was able to send it back to them via Whatsapp. I have peace of mind that I can check it whilst at work or on holiday and take some of action. 3) the settings are vast - you can have motion detect and various other settings where you look at tagged events rather than 24 hours in on go. It is pretty easy to setup and configure to however you need it 4) the camera are good - at night and with a mask you can't identify people from 30 yards away - but placed above doors and within 5-10 feet in the dark you get good pictures and they are pretty clear. 5) the recordings last up to a month - dependant on how you configure it, it can retain video for a long time. Less videos, lower quality of types of recording can extend recordings. This was a great purchase and comes highly recommended.

Update: nearly 3 years later working well. Also has come in useful for multiple contested delivery claims and a cleaner who put the key in an odd place and forgot where! Also remote monitoring of property when on holidays for extra peace of mind. I bought the 8 camera version for my long and oddly shaped property. The outcome: the quality on the cameras is stunning and high resolution. The software from Annke is really good and *quite* intuitive, but just read the manual and online support. It worked straight out of the box and has a host of features such as motion detection (you will have to play around with sensitivity and area settings here otherwise you'll get a LOT of notifications), recording timetables etc. The included 1TB HDD stores a LOT of footage - I'd estimate around a month if not a lot more. It gives us a lot of peace of mind, being able to monitor the entire exterior of the house as well as connect to the system via our mobile phones, tablets etc when we're out and about or even inside the house! It'll be invaluable security for when we're on holiday in the future too. The actual deterrent of a legitimate CCTV system can surely not be understated either. The installation, as expected, was the marginally tricky part - but not because of the product. Took me about 2 days in total - I'm fairly 'handy' but by no means a professional - so I would wager that most people could manage this. Sound out your house and make sure you have a good drill (and bits), ladder, screwdriver, CABLE TIES and electrical insulating tape available. Installing the cameras onto fascia/the house is fairly easy. You have to be creative about how to hide and protect the wires and connections that come out of the camera side - I opted for heavy cable tie use (about £2.50 for 100 cable ties on Amazon or similar) and wrapping heavily with standard electrical insulation tape - others might buy small junction boxes. I then bunched these up behind the cameras, so there is a slight unsightliness to the camera connection but it can be mitigated by proper thought-out planning and creativity! It's now barely noticeable as I tightly tied them to the camera. I had a long 10mm drillbit for going through the external walls, but I had to get a long 16mm (£5) due to the fact that the camera (blue) BNC cable connector is 15mm. Also worth bearing in mind is the fact that if you plan to put multiple BNC cables through a single hole, you will need room in that hole to accommodate the BNC cable wire(s) (~2mm each) as well as pushing another 15mm connector through. You may therefore need to drill two holes that overlap to give you the required space to push the 15mm connectors through. I then sealed up the holes with silicone sealant. Make sure you have cable TIES as well as cable clips for routing the cables to ensure it looks neat - or you'll end up with a mess. Plan it all out before hand. It's very simple overall - simply decide where you want the cameras and map out how long it is - the cables that come with the product are very long, and there is an option to buy longer cables via Amazon if needed. You will also have to plan how to deal with your many many many feet of spare cable before it feeds into the CCTV monitoring box.... I opted for cable ties and an old food box! Beware of the adjusting screws on the camera though as they 'strip' very easily! You will need to make sure that you have an HDMI cable and monitor/TV for the CCTV box to connect to in order to set it up - and you need an internet router nearby to connect it to via a LAN cable. I did not do this however - I bought a 'Powerline Extender - TP-link AV1000' from Amazon which extends your internet through your house via the existing electrical lines and connected the LAN cable from it to the CCTV box - so you don't technically need it to be beside the router - and it works really well from the garage of all places! Overall, the entire operation cost me about £200 and it's really incredible value. It's been running for a week without any problems so far. I would highly recommend this piece of kit. The peace of mind that CCTV provides you is amazing, and with the additional functionality that the included software has, it has allowed to be notified of any visitors, cars etc. We've now installed a similar set up in our parents' houses to great effect.

Really pleased with this. Quality's good, arrived on time and in perfect shape. Good price too. Would recommend and will buy from this seller again.

While understanding that no system will stop a determined burglar. I bought this system purely as a deterrent to would be opportunist burglars. Pros. Considering this product was less than £200 I found it good value for money. Its was essentially plug and play, The device works well through HDMI to our TV. Connection to the Windows Computer by way of Ethernet and Modem was obtained using the user setup book, but was difficult to follow. However perseverance prevailed and once I filled in the blanks from the booklet set up to our PC was successful. The system can only be used on the PC via Internet Explorer. Obtaining the iPhone app was straight forward and once I understood the Setup instructions am able to maintain uninterrupted connection through WiFi at any location over 4G and HotSpots. The default setting for compression is Basic, changing to H.264+ compression showed no discernible loss in picture quality, but the compression was much greater. On Basic with the 8 cameras operating I obtained a few hours short of 14 days continual recording. I have yet to fully saturate the 1TB HDD so I cannot state from use how much can be stored but it appears to be more much more than adequate for home use giving no excuse to purchase a larger HDD. Picture quality is good for the price of the unit in both day and Night time. See sample photograph. Cons. My system was intended for EXTERNAL observations ONLY. The Motion Detection is too sensitive and while it did give positive alarms on persons entering the protected zones, I found it was constantly giving false negative alarms and together with e-mail warnings I was rapidly inundated. I spent a full week trying to fine-tune the system. It was so bad I had no option but to reset the system to factory defaults to ensure all alarms were cancelled. I came to conclusion that the motion detection was for INDOOR use only But that aside it is still a reasonable system for the price. I would recommend the system with the caveat for the limitations i have mentioned above.

What can I say about this Annke CCTV system. Excellent may not be good enough to describe it. Although one cable and two cameras did not work, but one email to the seller, and they were replaced without any question or reason asked. What an excellent service. The cameras are small and makes them easily to install. I hidden most of the cables inside a conduit behind the walls as I was renovating my house. When I switched the system on after installing it, I was shocked by the picture quality and it was a amazing, and I am surprised how a small camera like this can produce such a perfect picture. I bought the 8 cameras system and they have been installed now for nearly 6 months. Not a problem with the cameras or the system. I was amazed how easy to install when I never done anything like this before but I did have knowledge of the technical principle of the CCTV system, so I know what I was looking for when I was installing the system. I was new to P2P and must say that the Annke App is not easy to set up but I used Hik-Connect app and it worked fine after I registered the cameras and the recorder. Rewind backword, record events, take photos are also possible and easy. Video recoding and photos can be emailed, WhatsApp or stored in your mobile. It will take me a while to use all the goodies and useful specifications. Every now and then I try new one useful specification . One thing I would like to try but have not yet got around is to restrict the area (zone) when it starts to record using the sensor. I am not interested if the leaves on the tree move, or a cat near by, or even when starts to rain. There must be something I can do to reduce the sensitivity and the zone size. I am sure there is one so I will need free time to learn. the software is slightly complicated but if you re going to have a CCTV then you will need to learn some technical words and enjoy the feel and the safety of your home. All in all it is an excellent system.

works better than I expected. I installed the new dvr and my existing cameras worked as before. The new cameras supplied have a higher resolution, so over time the old ones will be replaced. The smartphone app works well. As an added bonus I found that I could use network camera too with this dvr (max 2) So for the money it seems really good value. Time will tell how long it works for before issues arise. My old Lorex system worked for about 10 yrs, so time will tell. On the downside you probably will need to read the online help guides to get the most from the system as the supplied set up instructions were found to be lacking. Other than that a good piece of kit. setup iinstruction

Absolutely rubbish! Even my handyman could not get these working, camera quality poor and grainy, software would not work, nothing Ok About these. In end went for a different brand which worked perfectly. Would never recommend total waste of loney

If you're looking for a video camera system and this is within your budget, stop looking you've found it. I did quite a bit of research and the price point for this system is as good as it gets with this amount of resolution.Video quality is amazing at 5mp. The nvr is user friendly and easy to install yourself if you chose to go that route.the installation was quite easy if you read the instructions well before setting up. We can manage to set whole things up within 2 hours without any support from others.I had to lower the sensitivity settings a great deal. This system will pick up the smallest movements.You will need to lower the sensitivity setting to keep bugs and such from setting off the alerts.The night vision is excellent. You also have access to an app so you can monitor your home on your phone while you’re away. All I can say is that I’m really happy with this system and highly recommend it.