SUNBA 4K 8MP PTZ Camera Outdoor, IP PoE+ Security Dome, 20X Optical Zoom, Two Way Audio &Built-in TF Card Slot, 24x7 Automatic PTZ Tour, Night Vision up to 328ft (405-D20X 4K)

These are a good deal at the 300 ish dollar normal price but amazon has been selling these for about 175 each. At that price they are the bomb. Insane image.So several of my clients have been using the older models of sunbas cameras for almost a decade. I have setup and managed 20+ of these over that period of time.The worst thing about the sunba cameras was they had not replaced the active x controls that needed internet explorer on their camers and with internet explorer being a dead product you have to use there cameras with a dvr of some sort. My clients use blue iris that is a windows DVR program that also has ios and android apps. Works well with it.The new cameras have a driver install that works with Microsoft Edge now that seems to work well so fixing the Internet Explorer issue. I'm not sure if it someone other than active x or if they just packaged it to enable teh weird legacy ability of Edge. but on the two windows 10 computers Ive used it on so far it worked fine to access the camera using Microsoft Edge. I still wish that they would just fix it so that they were cross platform and worked with no drivers on Firefox, edge, chrome, opera, safari etc..so for this price you get cameras that have an optical zoom that is 20x or 25x for some models. Most of them are Ethernet and use Poe power, though all of them also have a standard 120v power adapter that can power them. They now have a 20x 1080 model that supports built in WiFi which is very nice. You can just use the power adapter that comes with it instead of using an Ethernet cable for data and or power.of the 20+ of sunba cameras I have installed over the last decade 3 have died. 2 had their motherboards friend due to lightening (in a very harsh industrial outdoor environment). You can get replacement parts from sunba for the motherboards and if you replaced them yourselves it would be cost effective. However if you have to pay someone labor to replace them you might as well spend an extra few dollars and just buy a new one. (this 4k one even at normal pricing is only 120 dollars more than fixing a multi year old one if paying labor, and about the same cost as one of these at 175ish dollars)The other one had the mechanical's that control ptz stop working maybe a year after installation, probably a broken belt the controlled the left right turning ability.The ptz function is very quick on these if using presets. 180 degrees in a couple seconds.I'm not sure that I would rave about the low light capabilities but I wouldn't say that it doesn't work well either. its just there and on a par with most decent cameras.

So I got this thinking it covered all of the bases I wanted for a PTZ camera that I was going to put up. From an external housing and mounting perspective it's built great, no complaints. Bonus points to the video head being able to fully rotate 360deg continuously.The night vision (when it works) is what you'd expect from a starlight sensor, so it's way ahead of non-starlight sensors. Considering the area it covers (looking out over a large backyard). It's great.Optical zoom is pretty good, and you do get the 20x ish zoom you would expect. It does have a bit of noise that does reverberate when it moves, so it's not completely silent.The problems start coming up when you start messing with it. The web interface effectively doesn't work on anything but Internet Explorer with an ActiveX plugin. This isn't too abnormal for security cameras, but it is something that is getting old fast, and I'm getting to the point where it's increasingly unacceptable. Configuration is fairly straight forward till you realize there's two systems at play. The web interface controls the camera overall, but portions of the PTZ is controlled independently, and is only accessible via Preset location "95", which pops up (on the video stream) an on screen menu to make additional changes to that, like set the home location. That is *SUPER* obnoxious, I get why it was likely done that way, but it's extremely poor user experience.So if those were my only issues this likely would get an overall 3 star with a weak recommendation. However now that I've got this up and in place, I'm finding the video stream to be exceptionally poor. It cuts out a lot on it's own, and when more than one device connects to it it basically gets overloaded (so if you have an NVR via rtsp and then connect to it from say tinycam pro to move it around to check things, you run the risk of getting lost connection to either or both). I've tried adjusting the video settings to make it easier for the onboard encoding to handle multiple streams, but to no useful avail. I have run into lots of times trying to move the camera with PTZ (via ONVIF) gets confused and lost and the video cuts out and camera just spins in circles till it catches up or gets power cycled. I've also seen (not regularly at least) where the day filter on the camera doesn't move and you get a ping glow to the whole night vision view.There's nothing here that screams, to me, that this unit is inherently broken or flawed. Like I said, when it works, it works great. This seems to be some issue more inherent in the system.I've attempted to contact Sunba tech support about the camera, to ask for guidance or commentary and their website is impossible to use to submit a question, and when I finally did I haven't heard any response in two weeks.Add that all up, and I honestly wish I could return the camera, but I'm beyond my return window, and it's bad enough I don't want to re-sell it because there's no way that someone is going to have a good time with this camera if their use case is even remotely like mine (and I'd argue my use case isn't terribly extreme given how many cameras I have running, or how many I've played with). The camera came so close to being what I wanted, I'm actually quite disappointed.