This evaluation first appeared in subject 356 of PC Pro.
TP-Hyperlink could also be finest identified for its reasonably priced business networking merchandise, but it surely additionally has a powerful presence within the video surveillance market. Its VIGI household affords a spread of community video recorders (NVRs) and cameras, and on this evaluation we take a look at its NVR1004-4P four-channel NVR and take a look at it with TP-Hyperlink’s newest C540V out of doors PTZ IP digital camera.
Costing underneath £100, the NVR appears nice worth however you’ll want so as to add the additional price of a SATA hard disk to retailer video recordings. On the rear are 4 community digital camera ports, every delivering PoE+ providers, and it has a complete energy funds of 53W.
HDMI and VGA ports help native monitors, two old-school phono jacks are offered for audio out and in and a separate Quick Ethernet port facilitates NVR internet administration. Setup is straightforward; after becoming a 4TB Western Digital Pink Professional onerous disk within the NVR, we linked an HD monitor and adopted the onscreen wizard.
To safe entry, you select an admin password and supply a restoration e-mail handle. You may also set a worldwide username and password in addition to a restoration e-mail which might be utilized to VIGI cameras after they first come on-line.
The wizard finishes by displaying QR codes for TP-Hyperlink’s VIGI cellular apps. To make use of them, you create a TP-Hyperlink ID account and bind the NVR to it from its internet console. We additionally loaded TP-Hyperlink’s Safety Supervisor app on a Home windows host and linked it to our ID account for distant NVR entry, though this doesn’t present occasion administration.
So as to add the C540V camera, we linked it to a PoE port and waited ten seconds whereas the NVR found it. All safety settings and firmware updates have been utilized for us, and the NVR assigned a base set of video parameters that included enabling the most recent H.265+ codec.
This IP66-rated digital camera delivers nice picture high quality. Together with good distinction and coloration steadiness, it has a pointy focus, handles vivid daylight effectively and its motorized pan and tilt capabilities cowl a number of floor. The IR LED gives good night time illumination as much as round 20 meters, its white LEDs are blindingly vivid, and the highly effective integral speaker will scare the residing daylights out of intruders.
The NVR1004-4P can’t match Synology’s DVA home equipment, which give slick individuals counting, face recognition and crowd management options, but it surely does provide a great vary of detection and recording options. For primary movement detection, you draw a number of polygonal shapes within the digital camera view the place you need it utilized, set object peak and width filters, tweak the sensitivity and allow human and car detection.
Good occasions go additional, and assist you to draw traces within the digital camera view to indicate digital fences and select one-way or two-way instructions. Customized detection zones might be monitored for objects being eliminated or those who linger in them for a selected interval, whereas entry and exit areas are used to control particular areas similar to constructing entrances.
Together with occasion recording, set off actions can embrace pop-up warnings, sounding NVR and digital camera audio alarms and activating a digital camera’s security lights. Recordings might be considered from the NVR’s native monitor or internet console, the Safety Supervisor and cellular app, with choices to decide on digital camera channels and scroll via their timelines to factors of curiosity.
The NVR1004-4P helps ONVIF-compliant IP cameras and it found our D-Hyperlink fashions as quickly as we linked them to the PoE ports. We custom-made the dwell view to indicate all digital camera feeds, however options are extra restricted as we may solely apply primary movement detection occasions to them.
You’ll want to make use of TP-Hyperlink’s VIGI cameras to get one of the best from it, however the NVR1004-4P is an effective selection for small businesses in search of reasonably priced in-house video surveillance. It affords loads of video analytics options, the C540V digital camera scores extremely for picture high quality, and the parts are provided at very aggressive costs.