After a recent break-in in the neighborhood, I bought a security camera system from Costco. It’s not that we necessarily need it for security but I’m a wanna-be James Bond and have long wanted a camera system. Last weekend I spent many knuckle-busting hours stringing cable through our attic and hanging cameras.
I took a few moments tonight to write up a review of the system we bought, a Q-See 16 Channel Full D1 Security System with 1TB HDD and 8 650TVL Cameras, or known by Q-See as model number QT4760-8H4. Bottom line: it’s a good system but not a great system. Costco has it for $200 off until the end of December and for that reason it’s worth checking out.
Below is the review I posted on the Costco website, which hopefully should be public in the next day or two. You read it here first!
I’ve had my Q-See system running for a few days and have some thoughts.
This system provides surprisingly good video for the price. It is a good overall value. The cameras seem sturdy, provide good resolution, and the LEDs illuminate better than I anticipated. The documentation is superior to that of most products I’ve bought. Hardware-wise, this is a solid system.
Software-wise, it’s a different story. I thought running cables would be the most challenging part but that was easy compared to the hundreds of mouse-clicks it took to set things up. The unit has USB ports – it would have been great to provide support for a keyboard, if for nothing else than the initial setup.
While I managed to figured out what was what on my own, I’m a tech expert and still found the user interface confusing. How do I map the motion areas? That’s hidden in the Alarms menu. How do I see the motion events? That I have get using search. How do I watch video spanning two days (evening and morning)? I’m still not sure I can do that without doing two separate searches.
Powering the unit on after having already gone through the initial setup wizard still brings one to the setup wizard upon bootup. Cross your fingers that your Internet router supports uPnP because the setup wizard will stop here otherwise and not let you skip its configuration.
Using it remotely is a challenge. For non-Mac users, the Q-See REQUIRES the use of Internet Explorer (IE). Q-See claims Chrome and Firefox are also supported browsers but only by downloading a plugin which actually runs IE inside the other browsers. While IE may still be popular in China, the browser has long since jumped the shark here in the U.S. Nobody uses it anymore; it’s a relic, and to base the remote access on IE and ActiveX is a poor decision on Q-See’s part. Q-See should have taken the time to build a web interface that’s standards-based and supported on a variety of browsers. The horsepower of the system would seem to support this.
I’m also not a fan of the proprietary video format used by the system. I tried exporting a clip of video only to discover I needed to run a proprietary app to convert the “DVR format” to one I could actually play on any other device. An export to AVI is what I should have done but this is a point not made clear in the user interface. I suggest users practice exporting video to get familiar with the process before an incident occurs where one might need to provide video to police. Handing the cops a proprietary file of gibberish they can’t use won’t help them catch the bad guys.
Q-See’s Android app (not included but available on Google Play) is even worse. Whatever proprietary video format Q-See sends to it puts my phone’s CPU through its paces while decoding it. No other app I’ve used has made my phone as hot as the Q-See app. My battery quickly drains when using it. The Android app appears to be a poorly-ported version of the iOS app, with no settings button available and very little swiping use. Logging in to my server is a clumsy, needlessly multi-step process. The search page is incomprehensible. I have yet to figure out how to review motion-triggered video using the app.
If that weren’t enough, the Android app is unstable. Should you move to a network where the app can’t resolve your server’s hostname (like moving from your home’s network to your office’s network), the app will go into an infinite loop trying to connect. There’s no built-in timeout and no way to cancel without force-stopping the app from the Android apps menu.
I give Q-see’s smartphone app itself 2 out of 5 stars. It would have been one star but once I figured out how to get video out of it I did find it very useful for checking my camera angles without having to get down from my ladder.
The Q-See does its main mission of video surveillance on a local monitor very well. However, it leaves plenty of room for improvement on the software and user-interface side. It’s a good system but not a great one. If you can live with the quirks (and especially if Q-See can upgrade its firmware with fixes) you can get good video with this system at an affordable price.