Geovision GV-FE420 4MP H.264 Fisheye Network Security IP Camera 1.27mm

When I decided to purchase this camera I didn't realize that Geovision didn't finished their job on it.

What I'm trying to say is that the camera has a lot of features but nothing appear to work as you expect from a Geovision product. I found a lot of problems when using the camera with image analysis specially speaking about object recognition. I'm frustrated with the result in this point but satisfied with the result on image quality.

Be aware that this camera doesn't work on GV-Eye for iPhone or iPad due the high resolution is greater than the software allows. Also the features built in are very poor like there is no object detection; if you use the motion detection you'll have a lot of works to find the object moving on a huge 4mp image.

Despite not made to work outdoor, I installed the camera on a Dome and it's working good there, either after some storms and sunny days.

Note that the camera came with the original Firmware and to upgrade you'll need to carefully read how to do it once there is an issue on upgrade to newest firmwares.

1. The ftpuser account to access recordings on the local microsd card has a password of 123456, NOT ftpuser as stated in the documentation for this camera (that was a fun hour wasted doing a hard reset and re-flashing after having mounted the camera).

2. This camera can't do more than one recording on the local storage, and it can't crop the recorded video (e.g. you can't do motion detection and time-lapse and full 15fps recording, or any of that multi-zone stuff they talk about without a dedicated high performance computer to do all the processing).

3. The image quality is fairly poor in low light, and 4MP is not as high res as you would think since a large portion of the frame is useless due to the extremely wide angle.

4. The stupid activex control is terrible and doesn't function well with IE 10 and keeps asking you to disable UAC on the entire system. I recommend not installing it, and just using quicktime and chrome... it pretty much works and you can change all the settings that matter. The camera records h264, there is no reason they couldn't have written the entire UI in a standards-based html UI that you could use with a real browser.

That said, I was able to get something almost working the way I wanted, so 3 stars it is.

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