Amcrest 4K (8MP) IP POE Camera, UltraHD Outdoor Bullet, 3840x2160, 98ft NightVision, 125° FOV, IP67, MicroSD (256GB), Human & Vehicle Detection, Tripwire & Intrusion, (IP8M-2496EW-AI-V3)

This is my second Amcrest product. (The first was the AD110 doorbell cam). The rest of my cameras are Ubiquiti UVC G2 bullet cams which are getting pretty outdated at this point and I am in the market to replace them with something newer. Since I was happy with the doorbell camera, I jumped at the opportunity to test out this 4K Bullet Cam. I've had it and tested for a week so here's my results.Pros:4K Image is stunningly crisp and detailedWide viewing-angle covers a larger area than expectedPopular protocols supported (H.264/H.265 and RTSP)Can use with any number of NVR systems or the Amcrest AppsSD slot card for out-of-the-box recordingCons: (There's only one)The cable extends out of the camera body for POE and optional barrel connector for power. This is not an issue if you can mount where the excess cable can be tucked in to a wall, but is the only thing I don't like better than my Ubiquiti cameras which allow the ethernet plug to connect in to the camera body with a weatherproof grommet.I unboxed the camera and it came with everything I needed. The sticker for the mounting pattern was especially useful. I ended up using slightly different anchors because I mounted in my garage on a wall which is drywall over 3/4" particle board. The quickstart guide covers using the apps (there are a few different apps Amcrest provides and they also cover briefly how to connect to third party apps such as BlueIris). To get the physical mounting instructions, the quickstart guide refers to a link with a video and some instructions. Even though the instructions were for a slightly different camera model, they are sufficient. Your exact setup is going to vary anyway so use your judgment along with the instructions for the guide.It's recommended to use a bare cable and crimp ends on to the cable to get the ethernet connection made to make it easy to get the connection in to the weather resistant housing. We had a bunch of snow and I couldn't get to the box of cable I had in the shed, so I used a 10' pre-made cable. As you can see in one of the photos, I had to trim the anti-snag part of the boot to make it fit. If you use a bare cable and crimp the connector on yourself as recommended, you won't have this issue. It is also why I ended up with a slight surplus of cable. I plan to redo the cable at some point in the future.Once the camera was installed, I turned the port on, on my switch and it powered up. The Amcrest app in search mode found my camera (and my doorbell camera too) easily and I was able to adjust the mounting slightly to get the exact viewing angle I wanted. I also added the doorbell camera to the Amcrest view pro app. If you just want basic viewing, you can stop here and you are good to go. I had some other things I wanted to test out including a live feed on my camera monitor in the office so I had a few more steps.If you go to the camera's IP in your web browser (I just used my iPad and it worked great) you can login with default credentials of admin/admin and it will prompt you to change the password. You can then see the live view and customize network settings, picture settings, motion/recording settings and stream settings. I ended up setting a static IP on the device itself as well as adjusting the settings on the sub stream to test them both out. I made sure RTSP was setup on the default port and I was able to add it to my camera display by just configuring the URL rtsp://<user>:<password>@<ipaddress>/ and it loaded up the main stream. You can really see (bottom left) how much better the Amcrest camera picture is than my other cameras. The night vision is really good too. A huge improvement over my UVC G2s. One thing I really like is you can move the overlays around the image to customize.For a final test, I spun up an instance of Shinobi (open source NVR) and was able to quickly add in my new camera and setup recording and notifications. This worked completely as-expected and I had zero compatibility issues. Basically put in the URL and it just worked.Overall this is a great camera and definitely a good candidate for me to use to replace my aging 720p cameras. The product supports all of the industry-standard specs you would expect and plays very nicely with both the Amcrest apps and the third-party apps that I tested.

Tl;dr: Good cameras except for the garbage firmware and app. Great for DIYers.I have been running two of these cameras for about a year and a half now. After some initial quirks with the setup, I was able to get both uploading still images to an FTP server. The app (both phone and browser) is garbage and filled with spyware so I don't bother using it at all. I do not use the video mode on the cameras because these cameras do have one important limitation: the upload speed really matters. If it takes too long to get an image or video uploaded to an FTP server, they fail silently and just don't upload the image or give you any sort of error warning. Now this could be gotten around by having an NVR or similar on-site to upload to and then have the NVR upload to a remote server. That wouldn't be a bad idea since these cameras do try to call home to China all the time and then you could isolate them from seeing the internet. Another issue is that every time they restart (you'll want to have them auto restart about once a day so they don't freeze), they delete all the old images on an FTP server. The company's documented way to "fix" this is to disable the ability to delete images on a server. That... doesn't work very well for a variety of reasons. Oh another weird quirk is that you can't set it to upload to a specific file name, such as if you wanted to point a webpage at a specific image. Instead I use a PHP script to identify the latest image that's been uploaded and serve that image to people looking at the webpage where I share the two camera outputs. One other thing to note... I have to use port 21 to get these to upload to an FTP server. I use a special account just for these cameras that's isolated from the rest of my server for this reason. There isn't anything particularly important that these cameras are taking photos of so it's okay for my use case. Your use case might dictate that you need more security.But for my application (periodic still images uploaded to a server), it works well enough. The image quality is surprisingly good for a $90 camera. The IR night mode is fine out to about 30 feet. After that, you'll need a secondary IR light source.If you were to pair these with a DIYed NRV that isolates the cameras on their own network, then these cameras would work great for a lot of applications. Just don't bother with the company's apps.Oh also these do NOT come with a POE injector. You'll need to grab one of those which costs about $25. Or plug in a wall wart transformer to the dongle off the back of the camera. I have chosen to go the POE injector route which has simplified my wiring setup. If I were running a bunch of these for a security system, I'd buy a POE switch.I have had these cameras out in the weather including down to 3F and up to 90F (in direct sun), with rain, snow, hail, and whatever else nature can throw at the cameras. So far the biggest issue was when a spider built a web in front of one of the cameras.