The other day I was in Costco and saw a 2 pack of Samsung security cameras for $200, so I bought them. As I knew nothing about them, this was one of those “Buy now and investigate later” purchases. I gave it to my wife for Christmas (she was VERY happy). Later, before it was opened, I went on line to check it out and the reviews were horrible. It is definitely NOT what I was looking for. One reviewer who also bought one and KNOWS all about this stuff wrote up a little piece on how it SHOULD be done. Buying the parts separately and the software. Here is that piece as taken from an Amazon review.
BTW, I will take the unopened package back to Costco and roll my own as per these instructions.
Here is the link to the full review of the camera I bought
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SNH-1011-SmartCam-IP-Camera/product-reviews/B009XP1HS2/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1
And below is the instructions on how to roll your own
Note:
This is not part of the review, but I thought I would add this information based on my experiences setting up and trying many different types of home surveillance systems.
A standard resolution IP camera running at 15 or 30 frames per second uses a lot of bandwidth—something WiFi does not have much of. Even when I was running only 4 cameras at 640x480 15 FPS on a 100 mbps switch I was rarely able to achieve full FPS on all cameras even though the cameras were all rated at 10/100mbps capable. It was not until I put all cameras into a gigabit (1000mbps) switch that I was able to get all frames to process through to my computer. There are very good technical reasons why this is so, but for those who don’t understand how switches work just take my word for it, you need a gigabit Ethernet switch and a gigabit Ethernet card in your PC (which most have today) to build a reliable home surveillance network with IP cameras.
Alternately, you can buy a Network Video Recorder with built in ports for each camera. For me, the best setup is a piece of software called Blue Iris ($50) and the Gigabit Ethernet switch along with a mishmash of IP cameras. This is by far the most reliable and robust I have seen and the cost can be quite reasonable as all you need are the cameras, the $50 software and a PC. Blue Iris also has an iPhone and Android app that integrates all the cameras into one system. It works like a champ. I am running 7 cameras, 4 of them 640x480 at 15fps, one USB at 10fps, and two 1080p at 15fps, all of them wired into a Gigabit Ethernet switch. The streams are fed into my PC running Blue Iris version 3. Blue Iris is recording all the cameras 24 hours a day onto one USB 3 hard drive. The 3TB drive can hold weeks of video. Blue Iris is also creating alerts every time someone walks in front of a camera so I can have alert thumbnails which take me right to the relevant video portion I want to see. I continue to be stunned at the capabilities of the Blue Iris system. It is the best $50 I ever spent on software.
While it may sound like I work for Blue Iris, I can assure you I do not. I just like it that much. For less than half the cost of a similar turnkey system from one of the big companies like Q-See and Lorex, etc. I can build a system that is better in almost every way, and you can too. Just stay away from this camera.“