The following is a personal opinion piece, not sponsored. Based on my expereiences as an installer of the following three major Chinese brands of CCTV. I am biased by my low tolerance of over-pricing and lack of features that should exist by now in some brands. I have formed by own preference through hands on experience and I’d like to take the chance here to share it with anyone who’s interested so that you might not miss out on some really good product because someone whos accustomed to mediocrity convinced you otherwise…
We get asked this question a lot. It’s hard for a potential buyer to know which brand to get because unless you’re an installer putting all these different brands in all the time, getting to know each ones strengths and shortcomings, you only know what you see when you’re out and about.
When your at your local fresh produce market you’ll probably see a Dahua camera. Mum and Dad businesses often are on a tight budget when it comes to security and Dahua is the cheapest camera brand out these. It’s everywhere. But is it any good?
Not really. It works. It’s good enough. But it’s pretty lackluster. It picture quality falls apart at night and the over all video quality is dated.
Remote access? The app is nice. It works and end users rarely get confused. Sometimes you have to remind them how to get to playback.
What about Hik Vision? Go shopping in town, your local supermarket, clothing store, places with more capital to invest in security often end up with Hik Vision. They didn’t chose it, their installer did. It’s probably the only system they know, they’ve been putting it in for years and they’re not about to change to a different brand. That’s too hard.
Is it any good?
It depends. The build quality is excellent and they offer a very nice range of intercom products that integrate perfectly with their CCTV, giving you one app for everything.
By crikey it’s expensive though. It MUST be good if it costs that might, TAKE MY MONEY!
Now, if you don’t know, you don’t know. But installers who have strayed outside their product bubble know that there’s more to CCTV than Dahua vs Hik Vision. They also know that Hi Look is just Hik Vision product with a different name on the front. Hi Look just created a sort of low cost replica of Hik Vision aimed at the adventurous DIY’er.
Hik Vision’s video encoding is probably the worst so far, out of the box it’s set to 6 megabit per second (which is a lot) and motion is still smudgy, pixelated and downright awful. H.265 shouldn’t require this much bandwidth to capture a lowly little 6MP image, but it does. Say goodbye to about an extra week of storage to make up for the poor video codec.
Remote access? The app is great. But when you’ve been exposed to the wonderland of full browser access to the NVR and cameras without a static IP or port forwarding like Uniview is able to do, you’re left wondering why Hik Vision cannot manage even the most basic remote access for installer.
You’re limited to what IVMS can do and while you do have access to SOME parameters remotely, it like to pretend you’re on a 56K modem on dial-up just to load the system info page, let alone do anything useful. The software is heavy, clunky, the latest computer and graphics card struggle to keep up with this absolute monster. All it’s doing is showing you a few video feeds but you’re computer is dying, screaming for mercy as IVMS rips every thread from the 12 core XEON processor as if it were Chrome with a thousand tabs open. Why? Because it’s an all in one server package and IVMS Lite is obsolete.
All that aside though, Hik Vision is a quality product and it does it’s job. With the know-how and a whole lot of fine tuning, it will perform beautifully… for twice the price of Uniview.
Uniview… the 3rd most popular Chinese CCTV brand you haven’t heard of. It’s been around of over 10 years now, their R&D department have been working overtime to beat the competition in every aspect of their products.
Each year a new model comes out, new firmware updates pushed over-the-air, improvement after improvement. There were teething problems along the way but this young brand has matured into a class act.
8MP 4K video at only 3 megabit per second using H.265 is crystal clear, no motion smudging and a night time image that would make a soldiers night vision goggles break out into a sweat. A near by street light turns the entire area into a sunny afternoon picture.
Standard Uniview 5MP turret from 2020 at night under the dullest residential street light.
The app works. It’s easy to understand, you can fully program the whole system with it if you wanted to, all over the cloud. No open ports required, no fixed IP address. The entire NVR’s webpage can even be accessed thru the cloud. Where Hik Vision issues almost always require a tech to visit site, it’s such a small problem but I can’t get to that setting! Bummer. Uniview doesn’t suffer from any remote access limitations and the end user has full control, no need to worry about back doors either. Uniview is cleared to use in US Federal buildings… why isn’t Hik Vision or Dahua? Weird.
Uniview knows it has to be competitive, they cannot relay on installers who default to their product like they do Hik Vision, so it’s priced very fairly. It’s more than Dahua but it’s obvious why, it’s an order of magnitude better but only marginally more expensive. It’s almost half the cost of Hik Vision which makes you wonder why Hik haven’t stepped up with features to kick Uniview out of the industry. They’re propped up by installer habit and the perception that they’re “the best because i see it everywhere”.
Uniview offer product at both ends of the spectrum, they have Dahua comparable product at the right price and Hi-Tech, specialised cameras that over-take Hikvision without costing more than Hik. It’s an easy Choice.
What brand am I going to pick?
Take a wild guess.
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