Anyone Tried Dahua HDCVI?

Hi Keith. Thank you for sharing your experience.

I have a small test going on using a good but cheap Chinese HD-CVI system (not Dahua). The cameras and recorder come from different manufacturers. 2 x 1280*720P Dome, 2 x 1280*720P Bullet verifocal, 1 x 8channel HD-CVI DVR.

Cameras are IP66 rated, The system works great.

Almost love it. HD quality, cheap, and very stable. No working iPhone/ Android App yet :-(

We in Switzerland have a strong markup I worry about selling HDCVI because if the clients google HDCVI and see directly the dahua prices :-) is there any idea to solve this problem? per example name it SDI 2.0?

Keith, where are you getting Dahua HDCVI? My understanding is that in the US, it is not directly available.

I am just curious. I can believe it would be inexpensive, I just don't know where it is being offered.

If this is a "branch" of SDI, is it safe to say it uses coax cable as well?

Putting on my double-sided "Installer" and "System Designer" cap, reliance on coax cabling is, IMO, one of SDI's main drawbacks: it's fine (in concept, if not necessarily operation) for retrofitting on existing infrastructure, but for a new installation or even an upgrade where I'm adding more cameras, a need to pull in more coax is far from attractive - it's an expensive, bulky, heavy, hard-to-work-with, single-purpose cable that won't be any good for anything other than supported camera transports... and I still need to run a separate power feed, which makes large bundles even more troublesome.

At least with 960H analog, I could presumably use baluns with Cat5e or Cat6, which is cheap, plentiful, easy to pull in large bundles, lets me run signal and power over a single run, and useful for all manner of other things (including VGA or HDMI to a remote monitor).

Of course, for me, the point-to-point infrastructure is a major drawback to all these systems as well. Analog gives me at least SOME ability to run multilpe signals on a single multi-pair cable, while IP's ability to "consolidate" bi-directional communications of all sorts (not just cameras) over a single transport has saved me major design headaches in some recent jobs.

Thanks everyone for the input. Good discussion!

I talked with Nelly Security about HDCVI availability and pricing vs IP. They mentioned that their HDCVI cameras are priced around $75/pc and 4 ch DVR is priced at $113 and 8 ch DVR is priced at $165. By contrast, the lowest cost IP camera (1.3MP) is ~$130. NVRs are around the same price as HDCVI DVRs but require an additional PoE switch. So apples to apples, HDCVI is notably less expensive than IP.

We are going to lineup a test. Just like we did with Dahua IP camera testing, we'll look to buy/obtain an 'original' Dahua system to do so.

Anyone have knowledge, whether Dahua HDCVI is available in EU?