That comes at $30 a pop. Zmodo is asking almost $60 for one.
Price: $89.99 & FREE Shipping
And I am going to give you a tip that will save you LOTS of cussing and evil stares from your loved ones: Use the QR code to set up the cameras and do it BEFORE installing them. Zmodo’s instructions are not the best, but once your cameras are set up in your phone, you can plug and unplug them at your will without having to suffer climbing up a ladder. If you need to contact Support, do so via phone; I went dumb twice and had a question a third time and it has been the phone support the best explaining step by step what to do.
Typical….
I can’t seem to figure out, from the listing on Amazon, exactly which model of camera these are. (Does anyone even use model numbers nowadays?)
Not that it matters, because when I look at Zmodo’s site and pick a camera that seems to match, I find exactly no actual documentation. Lots of marketing material, but as useful information goes, not so much as a downloadable user manual, never mind technical details – unless these are well hidden, as seems to be the fashion for consumer products.
I’m actually in the market for WiFi cameras, video doorbells, and so on… but I want to be able to configure them to work with MY server, dang it, not some subscription “cloud” service. And without any documentation on how configuration is done, and what can be set, I have to assume that they’re utterly useless for my purposes (and probably giant security holes wanting to be installed inside my firewall).
So it looks like I’m back to building my own open-source camera / motion sensor / doorbell thingies. Or maybe finding something hackable on which I can install open-source firmware that does what I want, not what the vendor wants.
Grumble grumble Internet of Trojan Horses grumble kids these days….
Same boat. I can tell you that the sv3c poe ip cameras on Amazon can be set up without a damned app, and according to my firewall they don’t try to phone home. Don’t know about the wifi versions but I assume it is similar.
Hm. There seem to be a couple of open-source video surveillance packages out there, with lists of compatible cameras. Some Zmodo models are on one of the lists. Trouble is, it’s non-trivial to correlate those model numbers with what’s advertised (and I’m guessing that most of the known-compatible models, from all vendors, are long since discontinued).
But… if the cameras normally operate as servers, and use a standard protocol (which apparently most of them do), and the non-cloudy phone app just pulls video straight from the camera, then they ought to be OK for my purposes. Maybe. And I am planning on setting up a special VLAN for non-trusted Internet Things. (This is all a couple of months off; got to get the distant house ready to move into first, then transport people, cats, and stuff across the country, and then set about configuring IT infrastructure and so forth.)