Defender SENTINEL11 4CH H.264 15" LCD-DVR with Mobile Phone Access and 4 Indoor/Outdoor Night Camera

Comments about SVAT Defender SENTINEL11 4CH H.264 15” LCD-DVR with Mobile Phone Access and 4 Indoor/Outdoor Night Camera:

I set this up for monitoring around my house. We live downtown in a pretty nice neighborhood, but a few incidents have occurred nearby.

Out of the box, the system basically works almost immediately. It records pretty high quality video directly the hard drive. I had it running probably withing a half hour.

Doing the wiring is of course a pain, but no worse than you might expect. The cameras are composite video with a ring of IR LEDs for night time viewing. They make use of S-Video cables, but this is because they use the extra pins to power the cameras/illuminators, not for SVideo quality. This is extremely convenient since you don't need to have power nearby the camera.

The system logs events like motion in your field and separates all these "events" into a log. You can then go back and play back the events.

After the wiring the next hardest thing was hooking it up to the internet. This is incredibly powerful once you get it done. Basically you can get it to email you whenever an "event" occurs, like the camera goes dead or motion occurs on that camera. This is interesting, but I found that every night I get around 30 motion events from various moths and things flying by. Even inside, bugs and fluff floating by can trigger events, although you can exclude regions and turn down the sensitivity so maybe I will be experimenting with that.

The connection to the internet went pretty well for me. It may be a bit complicated for people who are not really savvy, but probably you can find someone to help. Basically you plug into your Router (Mine was combined in the DSL Modem, so no new hardware). Then you need to open some ports to the world - this is explained in detail for a bunch of different routers on their website. A really cool thing is that they make use of the dynDNS website to keep track of your public ip. What this means is that even if your IP changes all the time (like mine), you don't need an expensive static IP from you ISP. The system detects the change and resets the thing on the dynDNS website. You can assign a name to your security system and then type it in your browser, and voila - you can see your cameras over the internet. It is also true that you can even view them over your blackberry! Using Internet Explorer, you can go and brows all the old events and look at live video.

It was a really fun project and I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in DIY home security. The hardware is pretty small, and the cameras are perfectly fine for home use. The manual is a bit brief on the use of the dynDNS, and it took me a while to figure out this is what it did. The instructions in this one part are a bit hard to follow. Other than that the manual is pretty good and very to the point.

Even if you don't hook up to the web, I think this is a really good system and I would say for small business and home use it is perfect.