4XEM 4X-IP7142 Outdoor Day/night Poe Bullet Ip Network Camera with 32 Cam Software

Reviews of 4XEM 4X-IP7142 Outdoor Day/night Poe Bullet Ip Network Camera with 32 Cam Software

1.) Not as capable as it seems, not well documented
Reviewed by: Mark McGinty Nipomo, CA
Rating:
When you look at the specs and the features it seems like this cam would suit almost any needs. Sadly this is not the case, a condition exacerbated by documentation that is incomplete, vague and partly written in broken English. (How a company can invest the $millions that it takes to put a high-tech product on the shelf, yet neglect to spring for a $grand or two to have the product's documentation proof-read by someone who learned English as a first language, never ceases to amaze me.)

One thing that attracted me to this cam was its ability to upload snapshots and/or video, via FTP, email and/or LANMan, in response to events (such as motion detect, tamper detect or digital in.) This functionality does, in fact, work, but what they don't tell you in the promos is that event handlers' media capture is limited to only 10 seconds, total! And after the event ends it takes the cam a few seconds to recover before it will handle another event. (I think it has to clear its media capture buffer, by finishing any pending uploads, before it can process another event.)

I'm not sure what it's designers were thinking, in terms of what users might need to monitor, but for me 10 seconds simply isn't enough, and a 4-6 second gap in between 10 second events is unworkable! Worst of all the cam can be instructed to stream video continuously to a LANMan share without too much difficulty -- why couldn't event handlers do that too.

In the event definition there is a section that lets you upload "custom script" -- which, given I'm a programmer, sounded promising, but there isn't a shred of documentation about it, and multiple inquiries/requests sent to the maker were ignored.

More, for all its settings, the cam seems almost impossible to fully control. I have not figured out how to bypass all of its automata, to make it take the pictures I need. All I want is to be able to read the license plates of cars that go through my gate, at any time of the day. In daylight, no problem. At night, if the car isn't moving while I screw with settings, again no problem. But if the car is moving and an event handler is in control, HUGE PROBLEM! The cam switches in and out of daytime mode as the headlights cross its field of view, the IR is switched off right when I need it, and the resulting pictures are abslutely worthless.

And there are numerous other corners that have been carelessly cut, "day" and "night" are determined based on one pair of fixed time values for every day of the year, day starts at 6:00 AM and ends at 6:30 -- lame! That's optimal maybe 2 months out of the year. I table-ized sunrise/sunset data for my area and wrote a script to reconfigure the cam accordingly once a week, but what a pain!

When you factor-in documentation that resembles a train wreck, and non-existant tech support, you might want to keep looking for something better... I know I will next time I buy another cam.

Features of 4XEM 4X-IP7142 Outdoor Day/night Poe Bullet Ip Network Camera with 32 Cam Software

4XEM introduces its first outdoor day/night IP network camera, the 4X-IP7142, which is equipped with a wide dynamic range CMOS sensor to cope with any challenging lighting conditions.

1.) NETWORK CAMERA W/32 CAM SOFTWARE;

Package Height x Length x Width: 12.5 in. x 12.5 in. x 8.2 in.
Package Weight: 5.65 lbs.

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