with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts so this is a
little new for us and full disclosure guys we're only doing this review
because these guys kard reached out to us when I happened to be already
shopping for a monitoring system for our
headquarters so I actually don't know know if their Aurora series AR 421 ckt
001 is necessarily the best thing for the price but what I will tell you is
that it's been torture tested Beyond just reviewing it it's been torture
tested as if we're going to actually deploy it because we are going to
actually deploy it the unit came well packaged with everything safely tucked
in the cameras were in protective foam and inside the ample nicely built outer
box the included cables are fairly unex
exceptional in terms of the quality but they're nice and long at 60 ft and
they're completely standard so they have one BNC connector and then one DC
connector that comes out of each end of the cable so you could replace them with
something else if you wanted to it should be noted one of them is thicker
than the others for the higher end camera and that is to support the motion
tracking feature of it and it's got a little tracking control toggle right on
the camera I personally didn't find the motion tracking that useful since I'm
more interested in constantly monitoring my my employees here but for some people
it would be great because what it basically does is it takes any motion on
the screen digitally zooms into it enhances it a little bit and then it can
do all kinds of cool stuff like start recording so it can trigger a recording
or it can email you a snapshot whenever something moves in that Zone on the
screen this would be great for something like your front door um the inclusion of
a mouse along with the remote in the Box was a little bit confusing at first but
when I started navigating the menus it made a lot more sense the unit
definitely operates best with a mouse so let's get onto General specs and
functionality the DVR outputs to VGA composite or even HDMI to up to a 1080p
display TV or otherwise the cameras themselves are weather resistant and
record in 800 line or 700 line resolution with 30 m and 20 M of night
vision depending on which model so I got one of the higher end one and three of
the lower-end ones with this particular kit it includes a 500 gig drive inside
this one of the first thing I did was like rip it open and find out what was
inside it's just a standard Cate Barracuda I would have liked to see a
nasg grade Drive in there such as a wd purple but most people will probably
never noce the difference and the good news is it's extremely easy to open up
and replace with something else if you want to all right so let's get into the
quick start guide it's actually really solid um so all you do to hook it up
physically is plug in your four BNC connectors plug in the power to the to
the DVR unit here and then plug in an additional power adapter to the wall
which has four pigtailed connectors to power the cameras themselves you
position the CER cameras wherever you want them plug in an Ethernet cable plug
in HDMI for monitoring and boot this bad boy up it drops you into the quick start
menu which for straight recording and
live monitoring is pretty much plug-and playay you can set it so that the quick
start menu comes up every time or it doesn't come up every time you power it on you can disable it um and yeah I
think my mom could actually set up this just just basic monitoring and recording
I did again I found it quite slow to navigate with the remote didn't the
remote that useful I suggest that people keep a mouse you know just kind of
hooked up to it and nearby but once you get things going with the mouse
everything in the menu is fairly intuitive so you right click to confirm
left click to go back if you've ever used Android with a mouse then you'll be
quite familiar with that and you know some of the the headers aren't that
welln named but the good news is that the manual is surprisingly good so I was
able to figure out what everything does and everything largely works with one
exception which was a little bit disappointing I wasn't able to get the
Dropbox feature working what that does is when you trigger a particular event
it can take um a snapshot and then automatically upload that still to
Dropbox for you I suspect it has more to do with my ISP than the unit itself
since they weren't able to replicate my issue but their support was overall um
actually extremely helpful all right so let's get into live monitoring and DVR
control so that's going to be in display over here there's a few different things
you can do you can set set up um so you
can pick all or one on cycle so actually
we're going to go here out of the menu out of the menu ah okay so that's all
down here so you can pick a single screen you can go okay I want to spy on
Luke or I want to spy on the new guy or oh my goodness is that a bathroom or you
can cycle through or you can see all of them or you can cycle through them and
you can change the cycle speed by just going into display and then Auto
sequence changing the dwell you can also change things like the actual layout of
the of them on screen so because they have models that support up to 16
cameras that's more of a concern for those ones because if you have four
cameras you're probably just going to want the the 2 by two since there's not
a whole lot of other options there um you can this is kind of cool you can
actually mask off certain regions so in that bathroom for example uh we had
masked off you know a bit of a privacy Zone here so you can just kind of go
okay we don't want to see people's Peeps and uh you know whatever's going on in
that corner we're not that interested in that you Mas that off and that'll actually be masked off in the recorded
file um you can toggle the camera name
as well as the time stamp on and off so there you go so see that up there in the
top and then you can trigger alarms Now alarms can be used for all kinds of
useful stuff let's just go into the alarms setting here D doop doop there we
go alarm can be used for all kinds of useful stuff including disc error motion
and video loss so yeah guys in the Spy movies where they just like cut all the
wires to the security cameras and nobody notices cuz they just happened to not be
this is like a home or small office class DVR and it supports triggering an
audible alarm when video is lost so there you go anyway you can also add on
additional sensors but that's not something that we did motion is something that I think will be used by
um the widest variety of people since
it's it's pretty useful so it can be done by schedule so you can have um you
can just have it recording at times or you can have it actually triggering an
alarm if there's motion at times so I'm going to go ahead and there we go so the
schedule here there's normal or there's alarm and then you can adjust a whole
bunch of the settings inside of it as well so here we go sensitivity can be
changed to anything from profoundly not useful because it's not sensitive enough
all the way up to profoundly not useful because it's too sensitive and
everywhere in between you can set up so that only a certain area triggers an
alarm so right now I have it set for the entire screen to trigger an alarm but if
I was to say for example not care if Luke is benchmarking which is his actual
job and I only want an alarm to go off when he sits down you can see that those
red ones spin in your chair like you're having fun at
work he's going to refuse to do it hey
Luke spin in your chair spin in your
chair there you go so you can see the red dots going off because he's clearly
having way too much fun thank you very much all right
um so you can manage what an alarm trigger does including setting up a
pre-record window before the triggered event so you get a little bit of preo
footage a post- record window pan til and zoom which is supported by the DVR
but not by these cameras unfortunately the alarm ringer can go off uh anywhere
from 10 seconds to 30 minutes and it's Extremely Loud which is why I have it
off right now it's not something that we want to be having go off while I'm trying to do a video here and then you
can set up push notifications or email notifications as well as that Dropbox
feature that I told you about before now when you consider that a home alarm
system with no video will cost you however much a month um and basically is
doing the same thing as this except now you get a live view of the action um 600
bucks actually sounds like a pretty good bargain if you don't mind the setup
under information you can head over to record to see what kind of quality
you're recording in which you set up in the sort of the other menu uh you can
also see how much data you're taking up per hour then if you go to Disk
Management you can set up how you want it to overwrite automatically whether by
capacity or by days or just never
although that's not necessarily something I'd recommend if you plug a USB drive into the back you can go ahead
and format that and you can offload footage to it by using the ah yes the
record search here so this is kind of neat in fact I'm going to go try and
find a clip to play for you guys that has the uh the motion tracking feature
on Luke's camera working there we go so let's go ahead and play back so you can
go ahead and scrub through the footage see okay there you go there you go so
you were able to see that Luke's camera is looking for motion and then zooming
in a little bit on it as well you can scrub through the footage just like that
pick a different time it's not the fastest most responsive thing in the
world but if you had an approximate idea of when a theft in your store took place
or whatever else then you wouldn't have too much difficulty tracking It Down
based on the UI here permissions Within These Menus can be controlled by user
account by default there's just one admin account and I didn't play around
with it too much because I can't think of a reason why anyone else would really
need to use it one thing that was kind of funny in the playback and review
section is that they did some QC testing on my unit on the 6th of January
unfortunately it looks like I have it set to overwrite by date so it's not
there anymore but uh there you go they
do actually test them before they go ahead and uh and ship these babies out
there are some color settings that can play around with I didn't really find
them necessarily that useful so you can adjust brightness contrast Hue stuff
like that uh and then you can do that by Channel or on all of the channels and
the image quality overall you know what
it's not the same as having a bunch of like HD camcorders set up as a security
system but it's functional you won't be reading a license plate from across the
street but if you were just trying to get you know a good look at a you know
Shifty character like our new guy here then you'd probably be able it's better
than a composite sketch based on someone's you know imagination that they
give to the police for example um back to network setup for a minute other than
the Dropbox feature upm dealt with the port configuration and this was kind of
cool is their mobile app actually worked effortlessly which um was surprising to
me because I've used some of the consumer grade Wi-Fi cameras and their
mobile apps tend to be really really terrible all you do is fire up the app K
view QR you go ahead and add a new camera by just scanning the QR code
that's on the top of your unit and then you just go ahead and select your camera
just go ahead BL BL I unplugged my Ethernet cable on the
back of this we'll be back in a moment oops and we're back anyway the apps
available on iOS and Android is fairly straightforward you can take screenshots
you can check which channel you want a monitor if nothing else even if you
don't care about remote monitoring because you can do it on a PC as well
you don't have to do it on your phone um even if you don't care about it at all
it's pretty useful when you're running around the house or the office setting
up the cameras because you can actually have a live view of what you're looking
at as you walk around and try to work on
it so what's the conclusion here um I
mean it's hard to say I you know it's like you know it's pretty cool you can
monitor your employees you can you know monitor the back yard I think the one
thing that I guess felt kind of missing like because I'm not a super a heavy
user like I just wanted some basic video monitoring so the one thing that I kind
of felt was missing is I'm a bit of a pack rat so I wouldn't have minded some
kind of a networked Nas Nas automatic
backup of the footage so I could archive more of it but I guess I could just put a bigger hard drive in the one concern
there is if I like if I was a thief breaking into a house and I realized there was a camera system I'd probably
try and find the box that goes with it but then you could always be smart about
that and hide it somewhere or make it somewhere difficult to access and then
also just have a a home alarm system so they don't have a whole lot of time to
look for it until the cops come and uh that's so maybe that maybe that's all a
non-issue I mean like I said I haven't tested many other products in the
category so I can't really compare to anything else I'd love to hear your
guys' comments if there's something else that I should be checking out it's
definitely like much more feature complete and much better to use than a
lot of the consumer grade like nanny cam on steroids style home monitoring Wi-Fi
cameras way way better than that um and not even that inordinately more
expensive but let me know if there's anything else that you feel like we
should really be checking out in this category I think that's pretty much it
guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a
comment in the video and let us know if you have any other thoughts about it any
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this was totally stupid and we should never talk about this category again
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unboxings reviews and other computer videos okay are we done sorry I got to
take like a wicked
pee what ah the lights out freaking
okay all right there's a camera in here isn't there I guess I'm showing you guys
the uh infrared feature so this is what it looks like at night spooky Vision
okay we're actually done
now
he