I’ve been hunting for a security camera setup for my home for quite some time, doing a ton of research, looking at multiple brands, etc. One thing that kept coming up is that a lot of the specs were very close to the same on many of the products in my price range.
There are obviously certain aspects that are different from each brand, like mounting options, hardware, accessories, camera options, and of course cost. But in a lower cost, “non-professional” system, your options tend to blend together across brands. There are also not a lot of power over ethernet (PoE) cameras out there in the lower price points. Especially not ones that are available in a full system configuration with an NVR, etc.
The TL;DR:
The main brands that I narrowed down to was Hikvision and Reolink. And the real deciding factor in the end was the cost of the NVR that was available for the selected system (I didn’t want to do a roll your own system). The Reolink system with 4 cameras and a NVR with a 2TB hard drive came in at $479.99 USD. For Hikvision, the just the NVR with a 2TB drive was $396.00 USD. So the Reolink system won.
