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On my quest to improve my home security, but not spend a fortune, I came across the H.View Colour Night Vision POE camera.

At £99.99 it is not the cheapest option out there, but I managed to get it for just £76.79 back in October.

The appeal of this, and the reason to spend more, is the colour night vision. Most cameras I have used offer excellent day time performance, and to be honest night time is good too. But black and white lose a lot of details if you want to identify someone in the event of criminal activity. Obvious things like car colours and clothes colours are completely eliminated when a camera switches to black and white.

Like many POE security cameras, this is ONVIF compatible and supports RTSP, RTMP, DNS, DDNS, NTP, FTP, UPnP, HTTP, HTTPS, etc.

Specification & Features

Specifications

  • Image Sensor: 5 Million Pixel
  • Lens: 4mm F0.98 110° of horizontal coverage
  • Audio: Built-in Mic, 8Kbps/16Kbps/32Kbps
  • Color Night Vision for improved low light performance and improved recording efficiency
  • Video Compression:H.265, H.264, MJPEG
  • Frame Rate: 5MP (2592×1944): Max. 15 fps,4MP (2592×1520): Max. 20 fps,3MP (2304×1296): Max. 30 fps
  • Weather Proof Rating: IP67
  • Ceiling / wall mountable

Camera Features:

  • High definition 2592x1944P resolution 5MP image sensor
  • Recording at 15-30 FPS will provide you with exceptionally smooth on-screen movement
  • Built-in microphone, one way audio
  • Color Night Vision delivers full-colour video of objects in low light conditions
  • Without infrared lights, camera doesn’t attract insects at night, can effectively reduce the false alarm rates of motion detection
  • No infrared lights, No reflection, which gives you an excellent chance at capturing license plate number and human face.
  • H.265 compression technology, record 30-50% more video on the Hard Drive
  • True WDR (up to 100dB) creates more detail in high-contrast scenes
  • Motion Detection, Continuous, and Schedule Recording Modes
  • Weatherproof metal housing for outdoor & indoor installation (IP67 Rated)
  • Ethernet cable can be extended to 100M, without any sacrifice of quality of camera

Set up

Set up is similar to most POE camera, you can access this via your browser to adjust the camera settings including users, colour options. OSD etc. If you are recording directly to FTP or NFS shares then you can set up the various motion sensing settings, as well as human detection, face detection, line crossing and intrusion.

The camera has both a mainstream and a substream allowing you to stream video at a lower bandwidth.

It is worth noting that this uses flash player to stream the footage when you view it from a browser, so does not work properly in Chrome unless you enable the flash permissions.

Blue Iris & Synology Surveillance Station

Surveillance Station

I initially set this up with my Ezviz NVR and it sort of worked, but for some reason, Ezviz would only pick up the sub-stream so the footage was low quality.

I have since built a server for Blue Iris, this was able to auto-detect the mainstream for the camera with no issues.

Blue Iris

I am also reviewing the Synology Disktation DS218play and tried to set up the surveillance station with this camera, using the quick set up I had issues getting this to work, but the full set up worked fine using the username and password you set plus port 80.

Performance

Once I was able to get the full stream working on BlueIris, the performance was excellent.  The overall image quality could be better, the 4K 8MP Annke offers vastly superior daytime performance, but it is the nighttime performance this is all about.

My street is quite well lit, which no doubt helps a lot, but you the colour nighttime footage works exactly as advertised with all the cars in my street easily recognisable by colour. Lights do cause glare so if the camera is facing directly towards a streetlight you may have some issues. This can also cause some issues with oncoming traffic at night as it can be hard to make out the car until the headlights don’t face directly into the camera.

Day time performance is average at best, but more than good enough. I found it is much quicker to switch to day time mode than Annke, probably because it needs less light. When it does go to day time mode, light glare is less severe.

Overall

Once I got this working with BlueIris I was very impressed, while it doesn’t offer the same level of daytime performance as the 4k 8MP Annke I reviewed, it does offer substantially better night-time performance. I can clearly make out the colour of my car, as well as any other down the street and it is easy to make out clothing details of anyone walking down my garden path.

It also offers superior night time footage and build quality compared to the cheaper Annke 5MP colour POE camera which I will be reviewing shortly.

H.VIEW Security Camera 5.0MP Color Night Vision Review Rating

Summary

For night time performance, this is easily the best camera I have ever used, everything else is a bit average, and at £100 it is not cheap, but I think it is worth it.

Overall
82%
82%
  • Price - 75%
    75%
  • Day time performance - 75%
    75%
  • Night Time performance - 95%
    95%

Last update on 2024-03-28 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

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