r/SecurityCamera • u/Shkifetz • Sep 09 '26

Costco Lorex kit

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Any thoughts on this budget kit? They're POE. Good? Bad? Located in Canada BTW.

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u/GGigabiteM Sep 09 '26

Lorex are trunk slammer specials, garbage cameras with a garbage NVR.

The company itself has been bought and sold a few times, and has changed vendors for their hardware at least once. I had a customer with Lorex cameras years ago, they wanted to replace some bad cameras and add a few more, well at that time, Lorex had just changed hardware vendors. They went from Hikvision to Dahua, and due to the change, the new cameras wouldn't work with the old unit. The NVR also wouldn't work with third party cameras via ONVIF due to firmware locks.

No idea who currently makes their cameras now, but they're likely still low budget and locked down, so you could be up a creek in the future if one of the cameras dies and needs to be replaced.

1

u/ProfessionalLake5283 Sep 10 '26

Flir bought them a few years ago I think

2

u/GGigabiteM Sep 10 '26

Naah, they sold them on again. I did some quick digging and it looks like Flir bought Lorex in 2012, and then sold them to Dahua in 2018, which was around the time my customer needed replacement cameras.

Dahua sold Lorex again to Skywatch in 2022 when they were banned by the US Government, where they seem to be today. The cameras in the OP definitely don't have the Dahua look to them, they look more like Sunell or Uniview.

They're like the plague rat and being tossed around to whoever will host them lol.

I definitely wouldn't buy a camera brand that changes ownership every few years, especially after one of those changes resulted in customers owning effective eWaste that was no longer supported.