Swann Master Series Home 8-Channel 6-Dome Camera 4K HD Indoor/Outdoor PoE Wired 2TB HDD NVR Security Surveillance System - White

As someone who has gone through multiple iterations of security camera solutions for home defense, this 4k Swann kit is a solidly engineered piece of tech. The first thing that stood out to me was that the cameras utilized power over ethernet (PoE) for power and communication, which reduced the number of cables needed for installation. This made it much easier to set up and gave me peace of mind knowing that I wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of tangled wires. My past systems had utilized batteries or solar panels for power, and being able to rely on a hardwired connection for power has greatly reduced the headache of monitoring battery levels across multiple cameras. Moving to this ethernet solution from my previous wi-fi systems has improved stability of the camera connections to the app and cloud storage. I would occasionally get drop outs in live coverage or motion events with my old system, but not anymore with this Swann. I appreciated the small footprint of the main controller box. It is about the size of a cable box, and is compact enough to sit next to my router on my shelf for an easy connection. I was particularly impressed with the hefty 2TB of onboard storage, which provided me with plenty of space to store video footage without having to worry about space management issues. Mounting the cameras was a breeze, and the easy-to-use app made it simple to monitor the cameras from my phone or tablet. I also appreciated the open ethernet ports, which would allow me to expand the system to up to 8 cameras in the future if I ever had the need to. As someone who lives in the Midwest, I was also pleased with the robust weatherproof design of the cameras. After observing the build quality of these cameras, I have no reservations about having them outside in the brutal weather extremes here. The detail and picture quality when connecting to a 4K TV via the HDMI cable was impressive. The night vision feature also worked really well, providing me with clear and detailed footage even in low light conditions. The Android app was also easy to setup and use. As a whole, the system has everything you need to have a high resolution, robustly designed, multi-cam security system with motion-detection. While I wish this unit had some additional nice-to-have features/upgrades (color night vision, spotlight, two-way talk), this product has all the essentials to make it a compelling product for the price.

Great product with awesome features! I would not recommend installing this yourself and just paying a professional to install it for you. There is a lot of wiring and you have to install it in the ceiling if you want it to look nice. It is a hassle to install but it is worth it once installed and working. The cameras look great once installed and blend in the environment once hooked up. This kit came with 4 cameras and all the hookups came in the box ready to go with the main console. It works great and the cameras provide a nice clear picture with high quality video. I installed this in my business as the features were exactly what i need with a small business. I was able to catch 2 people stealing already in less than a week of it being installed with undeniable proof they were stealing from different angles. This has already paid for the installation itself with preventing people from stealing again. The app is seamless and has great features to rewatch footage and download it whenever you want. 5/5 would recommend.

The first thing I noticed when I unboxed this system was the build quality of the cameras. The bases and swivels are cast metal and I believe the camera bodies are as well. They feel much better than my current plastic bullet cameras. I like that they use just a single cable per camera so only one cable to fish. The kit came with 60 ft of cable and a weather resistant cable connector cover for each camera. I see a small hole on the camera face that I assume is a mic and I have the audio set to max volume but I’m not getting audio yet. Must be another setting I need to adjust. The kit states that it has color night vision but I see that requires an external light source, like floodlights on your house. Without that, they only operate with the IR light that’s built in. The IR night vision is actually pretty good, the beam is a little wider than a spotlight and I believe the claimed 130 ft range is accurate. I initially took a camera out in my yard on a pitch black night to see how bright it was and uploaded the video to that large video site, if you search “Swann SONVK-876804D-US“ I think you should find it. That site compresses the video so I don’t think you can rate the image quality fairly but you can at least see the beam pattern. One thing that concerned me as I was searching reviews of this system before I got it was one reviewer that said you could not mask out certain areas of the view to block motion detection. We have a large plant by our front door that blows in the wind and will trigger a motion detector easily. I found that by navigating to setup/display/privacy zone I could add up to four boxes to exclude areas of the camera view to ignore motion detection. The shape of the zone is a square but you can click and drag it to make a rectangle of any size and combine up to four rectangles per camera to cover an irregular shaped object. I found connecting to the app to be easy. Just have to scan a QR code on the NVR. I have an existing Swann system so I already had the app and I was able to add this new system. Haven’t had any issues with accessing the system while I’m at home or away.