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SOVMIKU |
B0C7H42RQG |
R20XT9DL0LU06S |
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Patrick Calderaz |
3.0 |
A Good Featured Camera Thats Held back
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WHAT’S INCLUDED:-Sovmiku PTZ camera (Model SFHD985-P)-Screws and Anchors (The mounting plate is pre-attached)-Ethernet Cable Cover and Seal-DC Power AdapterPRODUCT:**This is an extensive Review. If you just want the summary, please go down to the LAST section**This PTZ Camera is POE. You need to either power it via POE or use the DC adapter. It is not WIFI and will require a network cable for Data connection.This camera is also compatible with Sovmiku NVR. (I don’t have their NVR on hand to test)NOTE:On the product page, they mention the “Guard viewer” app, but in the manual that comes with the camera they tell you to use the SEETONG app and in various product images, they have the Seetong app in those images being used. So for the purpose of this review, I’m using the “Seetong” Application.2nd NOTE:In order to Properly Record people you NEED to have the toggle “Enable Humanoid Alarm Frame” also turned on in the “Alarm Settings” category. If you don’t, you won’t get recordings for people as far as I could tell. This was really frustrating for me because I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting any video or clips in playback, even when I was testing full continuous recording.This Camera has several features including:IP66 Waterproofing270 Degree Pan/90 Degree Tilt4 IR Lights4 Spotlights (can be used as alarm function as well)Full Duplex 2-way AudioAudible SirenHuman DetectionColor Night vision (Using spotlights)Auto TrackingScheduling for EventsCamera SharingApp Experience:There are quite a few settings in a lot of categories when it comes to this Camear app that Sovmiku is using so instead of trying to explain all of those, I’ll just share some screens of the app and in the last section, I’ll try to sum up things. Overall it might be a little confusing for some people, This is because a lot of non western company security camera products tend to use words that don’t usually match with what we would use. For example, the word “Alarm” in a lot of these types of cameras usually just means motion detection and not an actual audible alert.Drive Away: is one of the buttons you see on your main controls. This is actually your audible and light alarm (Driving someone or something away). You can see what I mean by the confusion.Once you go into your Camera you will see the following buttonsRecord (taking a manual Recording)Capture (manual screenshot)TalkSoundHD/SD Toggle4 Screen (To see 4 of your cameras at a time)Cycle (Its like a patrol mode)Replay (Your video playback)SettingsPTZDrive away (explained above)Motion Tagging (sort of)PLAYBACK:When you click the playback button, you’ll get a timeline that you can zoom in and zoom out of. The timeline zoom is great because you can see down to the exact minute and markers in-between that minute! This is a big positive and I’ll add that into that section in the end.It’ll be populated with Yellow colored markers to indicate an event and you’ll also get a list of events below that. Normally events like this have a screenshot thumbnail of the event but in this case it only shows a generic thumbnail. I’m not sure why that is. Because there is no quick way for you to glance and find what you want. (Screenshot included in review)When you playback you get 3 controls. Manual Record it, Manual screenshot it and Fast forward the footage. It goes up to 16x Speed. You won’t see an extra progress bar that will show you where you’re at in the clip, but instead, you’ll need to rely on that same Timeline. (This is where zooming in is important when you’re trying to find the 30 seconds into a 3 min clip for example). And finally, you can filter the video to either ALL Types, or Human form.FINAL THOUGHTS:PROS:-There's a good amount of features with this camera. Though it may take you sometime to test all of them out to understand how they work. Including you get things like Preset Voice alarms you can use, or you can record an 8 second clip of your own such as “Get off my lawn you darn kids”. But this setting is a bit hidden. Its under ALARM SETTING>Camera horn alarm sound setting-Timeline zoom is extremely helpful, especially since that timeline doubles as the progress bar when you playback.-The main controls are laid out decent and easy enough to figure out-The Speaker quality is pretty decent-The Mic Quality is also pretty decent-The image Quality is also pretty good.-The Spotlights are bright and the IR lights do a good enough job for your Night vision.-I don’t think there is any kind of limit on the recorded events. It seems it’ll keep recording until the event is over.OK:-The manual is one of the better ones. It’s larger and has full-color pictures. It only goes over some of the basic settings however and leaves you to guess how to figure out all the rest.-Motor speed is not the slowest, but it’s not the fastest either. In the manual, the screenshots they used for their PTZ camera also have zoom and focus sliders. I don’t see any zoom, but instead, if you do the usual 2-finger Swipe Out, it will give you a 1-4x zoom indication. And although it is saying it’s zooming, i don’t see any kind of additional focus. So it seems more like a screen enlargement.They also show Motor speed controls in the manual. I don’t have thoseCONS:-I kept getting network connection exception errors when starting up the app for this camera. Usually, i could just ignore it and it would load fine anyway but this seemed to be an App bug.-When you get a motion alert, and you click the alert, it doesn’t actually go to the playback. It just goes to Live View.-Motors are a bit loud and you will hear them during live viewing and playback for certain.-Certain settings (not main controls) are a bit hidden or in spots that you wouldn’t expect. I think this app just isn’t made well for Western markets because of the location of certain settings and the words used don’t make sense to us. You will definitely have to spend time playing around with this camera.-This camera has motion tagging and honestly, i’m not sure how i turned it on, but it’s not the usual that we would expect with Green Rectangles where it’s easy to see the tagging. Instead, it uses very small upside-down Orange Tringles. I honestly don't care about the color, but the size of the tagging needs to be increased. It’s only easier to see when you are doing a zoom-in. And it’s also all over the place. The tagging NEEDS work.-There seems to be an issue when using Preset positions. Once you click a preset point (unless you have a guard point setup), it’ll then keep defaulting to that preset. Or if you delete out that preset. I can’t find a way for it to stop going back to whatever preset you had pressed.END:Is this camera worth it? It depends. You do get a lot of features, but it seems the app experience needs massive work to make it more user-friendly. There is a lot of competition in the security market space and I don’t see this doing very well with your average homeowner unless they clean The UI up a lot. It seems the functionality is there but getting to that functionality is the issue. They also need to add Motor Controls for this camera. They are just TOO SLOW. You will need to make sure this camera is set back as far as possible so you can get as wide of shots as possible. This will help you to auto-track people better, BUT you won’t get a good experience trying to track cars for example near your driveway. It’ll lose them in a heartbeat (again depending on how far back you have the camera).The Image quality and sound quality are good though and the timeline zoom with fast playback speeds up to 16x is a big plus. I hope they fix some of these complaints with software and firmware updates, which is very possible to do. They don’t need to redesign the camera.I would say it's a SOLID 3 stars but could easily be 4-5 with added motor controls and a cleaned-up UI. It has a lot going for it but it's held back by some key things. |
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2023-08-29 |
2023-09-06 02:08:26 |