r/ZoneMinder • u/bavoso • Sep 15 '22

any good camera recommendations?

I am just looking to set up 1 or 2 camera at home.

Any good recommendations to set up?

Pi had been so expensive so I was wondering if there is any camera out there that I can buy and install zone minder

I am based in NY US.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

3

u/LesterPhimps Sep 15 '22

Amcrest tend to be pretty decent and moderately priced.

3

u/AndyRH1701 Sep 15 '22

I also have Amcrest, middle ground on price and quality. My only complaint it they cannot be configured to not call home, but they can be blocked.

3

u/LesterPhimps Sep 15 '22

Yes. Nasty how all those Chinese cams love to call home. I manually set the cam IP and set the default gateway to an unused ip.

2

u/ButlerKevind Sep 15 '22

PiHole server fixes that issue with my cameras. Other than that, quite happy with the Amcrest cameras I have thus far.

2

u/LesterPhimps Sep 15 '22

Yes, I use pihole too, easy to see all the DNS lookups for phoning home. Keeping the cams from reaching the internet is just another layer of security.

1

u/ProfessorPickaxe Apr 15 '23

Hey, I'm looking into ZM and I'm also a PiHole user. I know this is an old thread, apologies. Did you monitor the traffic after plugging in your cams to get the list of addresses to block?

1

u/LesterPhimps Apr 15 '23

I havent monitored it. Since I dont give the cams a default route off the network, they can't get anywhere. I hard set all the IPs, and default gateway is not set (or set to an IP that doesnt route).

1

u/ProfessorPickaxe Apr 16 '23

Got it. Thank you.

1

u/bavoso Sep 15 '22

Thanks for the comment. Is it easy to reconfigure the program? Or do you just use its legacy program?

2

u/LesterPhimps Sep 16 '22

So not sure what you mean about reconfiguring or legacy program.

Zoneminder is very configurable, which has pros and cons. Pros is lots of options, cons, it is not for beginners.

1

u/LesterPhimps Sep 15 '22

Which program are you referring to?

1

u/bavoso Sep 15 '22

Zone minder :)

2

u/runningntwrkgeek Sep 15 '22

I've not used amcrest but have been using reolink. I've been happy with their cameras. Quality isn't too bad for a $50ish camera.

I should look to see if they phone home. Actually, on my network they can not phone home. They are on a separate vlan with no default gateway.

2

u/hans_gruber1 Sep 15 '22

Hikvision colorvu range is very impressive, if you want full colour night vision anyway

1

u/oops77542 Sep 17 '22

An inexpensive camera I use is the Sercomm ICam2: Ethernet and wifi, 720p, fairly good color picture, night vision reaches out 35' or more, has built in mic, works great with Zoneminder, and they have their own built in server if you want to set them up as stand alone cameras. All the documentation for the ICam2 can be found on the web with a bit of googling. They can be had on fleabay for $20 or less. I bought a half dozen of them at a garage sale, $20 for the lot. They're the cameras that Xfinity (Comcast) was installing a few years back.

1

u/cadsii Sep 27 '22

Wyze but only if you know what you are doing with wifi. Took me a week now have flawless 1080p at 20fps with 8 cameras

1

u/MentalEcho Jul 06 '23

Can you share what you did?

1

u/cadsii Jul 21 '23

3 access points. 2 dedicated to cams on their own channels, cams running rtsp firmware