KGuard Aurora AR421-CKT001 4 Camera Video Surveillance System
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
3,079 words · ~15 min read
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with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
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amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts so this is a
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little new for us and full disclosure guys we're only doing this review
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because these guys kard reached out to us when I happened to be already
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shopping for a monitoring system for our
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headquarters so I actually don't know know if their Aurora series AR 421 ckt
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001 is necessarily the best thing for the price but what I will tell you is
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that it's been torture tested Beyond just reviewing it it's been torture
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tested as if we're going to actually deploy it because we are going to
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actually deploy it the unit came well packaged with everything safely tucked
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in the cameras were in protective foam and inside the ample nicely built outer
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box the included cables are fairly unex
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exceptional in terms of the quality but they're nice and long at 60 ft and
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they're completely standard so they have one BNC connector and then one DC
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connector that comes out of each end of the cable so you could replace them with
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something else if you wanted to it should be noted one of them is thicker
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than the others for the higher end camera and that is to support the motion
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tracking feature of it and it's got a little tracking control toggle right on
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the camera I personally didn't find the motion tracking that useful since I'm
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more interested in constantly monitoring my my employees here but for some people
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it would be great because what it basically does is it takes any motion on
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the screen digitally zooms into it enhances it a little bit and then it can
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do all kinds of cool stuff like start recording so it can trigger a recording
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or it can email you a snapshot whenever something moves in that Zone on the
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screen this would be great for something like your front door um the inclusion of
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a mouse along with the remote in the Box was a little bit confusing at first but
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when I started navigating the menus it made a lot more sense the unit
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definitely operates best with a mouse so let's get onto General specs and
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functionality the DVR outputs to VGA composite or even HDMI to up to a 1080p
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display TV or otherwise the cameras themselves are weather resistant and
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record in 800 line or 700 line resolution with 30 m and 20 M of night
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vision depending on which model so I got one of the higher end one and three of
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the lower-end ones with this particular kit it includes a 500 gig drive inside
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this one of the first thing I did was like rip it open and find out what was
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inside it's just a standard Cate Barracuda I would have liked to see a
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nasg grade Drive in there such as a wd purple but most people will probably
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never noce the difference and the good news is it's extremely easy to open up
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and replace with something else if you want to all right so let's get into the
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quick start guide it's actually really solid um so all you do to hook it up
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physically is plug in your four BNC connectors plug in the power to the to
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the DVR unit here and then plug in an additional power adapter to the wall
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which has four pigtailed connectors to power the cameras themselves you
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position the CER cameras wherever you want them plug in an Ethernet cable plug
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in HDMI for monitoring and boot this bad boy up it drops you into the quick start
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menu which for straight recording and
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live monitoring is pretty much plug-and playay you can set it so that the quick
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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
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think my mom could actually set up this just just basic monitoring and recording
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I did again I found it quite slow to navigate with the remote didn't the
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remote that useful I suggest that people keep a mouse you know just kind of
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hooked up to it and nearby but once you get things going with the mouse
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everything in the menu is fairly intuitive so you right click to confirm
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left click to go back if you've ever used Android with a mouse then you'll be
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quite familiar with that and you know some of the the headers aren't that
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welln named but the good news is that the manual is surprisingly good so I was
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able to figure out what everything does and everything largely works with one
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exception which was a little bit disappointing I wasn't able to get the
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Dropbox feature working what that does is when you trigger a particular event
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it can take um a snapshot and then automatically upload that still to
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Dropbox for you I suspect it has more to do with my ISP than the unit itself
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since they weren't able to replicate my issue but their support was overall um
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actually extremely helpful all right so let's get into live monitoring and DVR
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control so that's going to be in display over here there's a few different things
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you can do you can set set up um so you
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can pick all or one on cycle so actually
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we're going to go here out of the menu out of the menu ah okay so that's all
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down here so you can pick a single screen you can go okay I want to spy on
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Luke or I want to spy on the new guy or oh my goodness is that a bathroom or you
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can cycle through or you can see all of them or you can cycle through them and
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you can change the cycle speed by just going into display and then Auto
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sequence changing the dwell you can also change things like the actual layout of
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the of them on screen so because they have models that support up to 16
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cameras that's more of a concern for those ones because if you have four
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cameras you're probably just going to want the the 2 by two since there's not
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a whole lot of other options there um you can this is kind of cool you can
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actually mask off certain regions so in that bathroom for example uh we had
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masked off you know a bit of a privacy Zone here so you can just kind of go
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okay we don't want to see people's Peeps and uh you know whatever's going on in
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that corner we're not that interested in that you Mas that off and that'll actually be masked off in the recorded
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file um you can toggle the camera name
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as well as the time stamp on and off so there you go so see that up there in the
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top and then you can trigger alarms Now alarms can be used for all kinds of
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useful stuff let's just go into the alarms setting here D doop doop there we
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go alarm can be used for all kinds of useful stuff including disc error motion
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and video loss so yeah guys in the Spy movies where they just like cut all the
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wires to the security cameras and nobody notices cuz they just happened to not be
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this is like a home or small office class DVR and it supports triggering an
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audible alarm when video is lost so there you go anyway you can also add on
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additional sensors but that's not something that we did motion is something that I think will be used by
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um the widest variety of people since
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it's it's pretty useful so it can be done by schedule so you can have um you
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can just have it recording at times or you can have it actually triggering an
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alarm if there's motion at times so I'm going to go ahead and there we go so the
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schedule here there's normal or there's alarm and then you can adjust a whole
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bunch of the settings inside of it as well so here we go sensitivity can be
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changed to anything from profoundly not useful because it's not sensitive enough
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all the way up to profoundly not useful because it's too sensitive and
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everywhere in between you can set up so that only a certain area triggers an
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alarm so right now I have it set for the entire screen to trigger an alarm but if
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I was to say for example not care if Luke is benchmarking which is his actual
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job and I only want an alarm to go off when he sits down you can see that those
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red ones spin in your chair like you're having fun at
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work he's going to refuse to do it hey
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Luke spin in your chair spin in your
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chair there you go so you can see the red dots going off because he's clearly
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having way too much fun thank you very much all right
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um so you can manage what an alarm trigger does including setting up a
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pre-record window before the triggered event so you get a little bit of preo
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footage a post- record window pan til and zoom which is supported by the DVR
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but not by these cameras unfortunately the alarm ringer can go off uh anywhere
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from 10 seconds to 30 minutes and it's Extremely Loud which is why I have it
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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
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can set up push notifications or email notifications as well as that Dropbox
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feature that I told you about before now when you consider that a home alarm
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system with no video will cost you however much a month um and basically is
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doing the same thing as this except now you get a live view of the action um 600
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bucks actually sounds like a pretty good bargain if you don't mind the setup
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under information you can head over to record to see what kind of quality
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you're recording in which you set up in the sort of the other menu uh you can
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also see how much data you're taking up per hour then if you go to Disk
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Management you can set up how you want it to overwrite automatically whether by
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capacity or by days or just never
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although that's not necessarily something I'd recommend if you plug a USB drive into the back you can go ahead
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and format that and you can offload footage to it by using the ah yes the
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record search here so this is kind of neat in fact I'm going to go try and
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find a clip to play for you guys that has the uh the motion tracking feature
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on Luke's camera working there we go so let's go ahead and play back so you can
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go ahead and scrub through the footage see okay there you go there you go so
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you were able to see that Luke's camera is looking for motion and then zooming
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in a little bit on it as well you can scrub through the footage just like that
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pick a different time it's not the fastest most responsive thing in the
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world but if you had an approximate idea of when a theft in your store took place
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or whatever else then you wouldn't have too much difficulty tracking It Down
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based on the UI here permissions Within These Menus can be controlled by user
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account by default there's just one admin account and I didn't play around
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with it too much because I can't think of a reason why anyone else would really
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need to use it one thing that was kind of funny in the playback and review
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section is that they did some QC testing on my unit on the 6th of January
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unfortunately it looks like I have it set to overwrite by date so it's not
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there anymore but uh there you go they
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do actually test them before they go ahead and uh and ship these babies out
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there are some color settings that can play around with I didn't really find
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them necessarily that useful so you can adjust brightness contrast Hue stuff
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like that uh and then you can do that by Channel or on all of the channels and
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the image quality overall you know what
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it's not the same as having a bunch of like HD camcorders set up as a security
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system but it's functional you won't be reading a license plate from across the
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street but if you were just trying to get you know a good look at a you know
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Shifty character like our new guy here then you'd probably be able it's better
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than a composite sketch based on someone's you know imagination that they
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give to the police for example um back to network setup for a minute other than
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the Dropbox feature upm dealt with the port configuration and this was kind of
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cool is their mobile app actually worked effortlessly which um was surprising to
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me because I've used some of the consumer grade Wi-Fi cameras and their
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mobile apps tend to be really really terrible all you do is fire up the app K
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view QR you go ahead and add a new camera by just scanning the QR code
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that's on the top of your unit and then you just go ahead and select your camera
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just go ahead BL BL I unplugged my Ethernet cable on the
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back of this we'll be back in a moment oops and we're back anyway the apps
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available on iOS and Android is fairly straightforward you can take screenshots
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you can check which channel you want a monitor if nothing else even if you
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don't care about remote monitoring because you can do it on a PC as well
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you don't have to do it on your phone um even if you don't care about it at all
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it's pretty useful when you're running around the house or the office setting
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up the cameras because you can actually have a live view of what you're looking
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at as you walk around and try to work on
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it so what's the conclusion here um I
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mean it's hard to say I you know it's like you know it's pretty cool you can
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monitor your employees you can you know monitor the back yard I think the one
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thing that I guess felt kind of missing like because I'm not a super a heavy
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user like I just wanted some basic video monitoring so the one thing that I kind
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of felt was missing is I'm a bit of a pack rat so I wouldn't have minded some
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kind of a networked Nas Nas automatic
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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
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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
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try and find the box that goes with it but then you could always be smart about
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that and hide it somewhere or make it somewhere difficult to access and then
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also just have a a home alarm system so they don't have a whole lot of time to
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look for it until the cops come and uh that's so maybe that maybe that's all a
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non-issue I mean like I said I haven't tested many other products in the
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category so I can't really compare to anything else I'd love to hear your
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guys' comments if there's something else that I should be checking out it's
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definitely like much more feature complete and much better to use than a
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lot of the consumer grade like nanny cam on steroids style home monitoring Wi-Fi
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cameras way way better than that um and not even that inordinately more
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expensive but let me know if there's anything else that you feel like we
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should really be checking out in this category I think that's pretty much it
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guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a
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requests for other like you know security system stuff or if you thought
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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
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take like a wicked
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pee what ah the lights out freaking
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okay all right there's a camera in here isn't there I guess I'm showing you guys
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the uh infrared feature so this is what it looks like at night spooky Vision
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okay we're actually done
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now
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he