Wireless Security Camera System,SMONET 1080P 8 Channel Home Surveillance DVR Kits with 4pcs 2MP Full HD Cameras 1TB HDD Night Vision Motion Detection Free App for Indoor Outdoor 24/7 Video Recording

I purchased the wireless system, The reason I gave all five stars is because it’s comparable to much more expensive systems I’ve used in the past, as far as cost vs product it over performs anything I’ve seen of equal or greater cost, the features I require in a security camera system is the ability to livestream to tv/monitor (watching my kids play outside), ability to monitor from anywhere via app installed on both my phone and iPad, 24/7 recording and playback, holding up to the elements (I live in Northern MN), the ability to manually select alert zones, and I know I’m leaving some things out, the night viewing works as well as it can short of lighting up the yard at night, I usually go all out and pay too much for the “best of the best”, but this particular system replaced a much more expensive wired system since I got it for near the price of a single camera for my old one, Im equally satisfied with quality & performance but at a mere fraction of the cost, test of time is all that’s left but so far it’s off to a good start.

This economically priced security camera system performs well. I bought this system after being disappointed with an Arlo system that I purchased. That system required the battery-powered cameras to be recharged and a paid subscription for uploading security footage to the cloud. With the Smonet system and its wifi network, every camera can be located without the need for a cable connection to the NVR and monitor. An AC outlet is required to power up each camera- eliminating the need to recharge the camera battery. The video feeds can be viewed on a smartphone or a TV monitor attached to the NVR recording device by HDMI cable.In my experience, the wifi signal worked very well, despite using it in a city crowded with interfering wifi frequencies. All the cameras were able to transmit the signal to the Smonet recording device. The Smonet system records and stores the camera footage at your home or place of business. In these times of Surveillance Capitalism, it is a relief to know that the views of your cameras will not be uploaded to cloud-based networks like those of Google or Amazon.The Smonet is fairly simple to set up but in the event of difficulty, their customer service is very helpful. The first attempts at contacting customer service took a day or two—the company is in China and telephone customer service is provided during their daytime hours. But after initial contact, the agent was quick to respond and very helpful. Using video calls with Wechat or Whatsup on your phone makes communication much easier.The ball joint camera swivel mount has limited movement preventing easy aiming of the camera. A camera stopped functioning after being flooded in a heavy rain storm--this camera had been aimed upwards, causing rain to fall on the lens panel and penetrate the housing. After explaining the problem to the agent, he consulted with their engineer and quickly sent a replacement camera that arrived within the week. The replacement camera was a different design which he said could be aimed upwards and eliminate the possibility of water damage. I am currently using that camera without a problem yet and I am a very satisfied customer.

My initial installation of this camera systems was easy and performed very well for many months. My primary purpose for this camera system was to monitor wildlife at our lake house. Suddenly, I lost access to my systems via the app. After making several attempts on my own to restore the connection I reached out to SMONet. The technical support team offered numerous solutions and finally Nacho personally called me and walked me through the recovery process. Now I have all access and can view wildlife and remote conditions.

Product was as described, I would buy it again. The shipping was fast. The camera gives a crystal clear picture and it is easy to playback. Also picks up good audio.

Update (11/11/2022):Apparently, this NVR decided to crash and/or freeze at 1 AM several days ago, and I only today noticed it wasn't recording anything. I definitely can't trust this NVR and intend to return it as soon as I'm able to replace the unit and cameras with some from a more reputable brand.If you're having similar stability issues but for some reason decide to keep this thing, then I highly suggest setting it up on a timed outlet so it forces a reset each day. Not ideal, due to the potential risk of some data corruption, but I'll take that over this thing conking out for a few days at a time.Original Review:Our previous SMONET NVR only supported four channels, so we decided to purchase an eight-channel SMONET NVR and add our existing wireless SMONET cameras to it for a total of eight cameras. Unfortunately, the old cameras didn't work with the newer NVR, so we ended up having to replace the four existing cameras with the new ones we'd just received with the new NVR and purchase another eight-channel NVR to get four more compatible cameras (since buying the four cameras separately was far more expensive for some reason). Not a great start, but it gets worse.I'm really torn on the user interface for this new NVR, as it's better in some ways and far worse in others...and that isn't even accounting for the poor performance of this NVR, despite us currently still only using four cameras with it. The worst part is that video playback is very janky, with the playback controls becoming unresponsive and/or grayed seemingly at random, some of the channels' playback dropping out entirely at times, and playback between channels getting desynced to the point that things get very confusing.To me, this is an early indication that I don't want to put much trust in this particular NVR to reliably record and play back footage when I need it. I shudder to think how badly this thing will perform once we get the other four cameras installed, and I'm actually researching other NVR solutions in hopes we could at least use the SMONET cameras and use a better NVR or a PC-based software solution that won't make reviewing and backing up footage so tedious.By the way, maybe the software on these SMONET NVRs will eventually get to a better place, but I'd like to at least recommend two things:1. Let the user zoom in on the playback timeline. It's so frustrating trying to scrub back and forth on the timeline on these things, even with the older unit.2. Add a customizable set of buttons that let you skip backwards and ahead a certain number of seconds, similar to how you might skip ahead on Netflix or other modern media players. It'd be so much faster than fast-forwarding, especially given how poorly this unit seems to handle that. (Rather than actually fast-forwarding, it just seems to update at an "8X" playback speed by simply skipping ahead roughly that many seconds and displaying one frame per second, which makes reviewing video ABYSMAL.)So far, I'm pretty disappointed in this product. I really hope its performance can be improved through a software update or something, but I'm not holding my breath for that.