Arecont Omni Cameras W/ Avigilon?

I don't have direct experience with integrating them into Avigilon, but I have extensive experience with the cameras themselves, used with Exacq, Salient, and Genetec VMS's. We've installed dozens (100+) and have had 1 camera with an issue that has had to be replaced, which happened within a day after troubleshooting. 

I have no vested interest in Arecont and in fact have liked to keep them a secret as a competitive advantage for a long time, but I know that many of the reviews here have been less than stellar. With that said, the scenarios where we are using them are very specific and very carefully engineered, so we've not had issues with low light, etc. With that said, I'm sure that if they're not used in the right scenario (i.e., you mean a 5MP camera doesn't work well in low light? whodathunkit?), the potential for a negative experience is very high.

I would absolutely consider them in place of the Avigilon multisensors, especially because they don't have analytics anyways. There's no real reason to use them unless you're just really lazy and don't want to do lens calculations. 

I was waiting to see other people's responses before I chimed in.   We have a lot of Avigilon systems in the field and the systems we have to service the most have Arecont cameras on them.  The last Arecont camera I tried was the 4 head Omni.   I ordered one in-house to test and it connected and motion detection worked on our test system at the office.   I let the camera connected for about 2 weeks and everything seemed fine so against my better judgment I sold one for a project.   

We installed the camera on site and everything seemed to work fine for the first could of days until the customer called and said the camera was disconnected.  We went on a site and confirmed the camera was no longer connected.   We rebooted the camera and reconnected it to ACC and everything seemed fine again until we got the same call from the customer a couple days later.  This went on for a couple of weeks where we had to send a tech onsite to reconnect the camera to ACC every couple of days.  

To my surprise Arecont support blamed the issue on the Cisco switches as at my office we run HP Procurve and didn't have an issue. There support said Arecont cameras aren't compatible with Cisco switches.  I picked my jaw off the floor and ordered an Avigilon Multi-head to replace the Omni and we haven't had a call since and this has been over a year now. 

Another issue I saw with the 12MP 180 cameras from Arecont is when the screen is full of motion on all images ACC would stop recording.  Basically, it seemed like the camera was overwhelmed with motion and would stop sending the motion flag to ACC.   We had other customers with the same 12MP 180 camera and I checked their systems and I saw the same issue.  When there was a lot off motion on all images ACC would not have recorded video.   Again I ordered an Avigilon camera to replace the Arecont 180 and haven't had an issue since.  

I am going to try Arecont again as I really could see a lot of uses for this camera though I don't have my hopes up. 

The problem with the H3 series is that the jacket on the Ethernet cable that passes through the knuckle assembly degrades, and then if water fills the pivot (which is not sealed) it can pipe directly into the camera.

I had 2-12MP and 1-20MP Arecont cameras at a customers site, that were only up for two or three months. Storage on the Avigilon server was less than 15 days, switched them out with Avigilon 12MP and was getting 45 days of storage. Avigilon has much better pictures and a lot easier to set up and configure, than the Arecont.   

I would seriously look at the Hanwha multi sensor cameras as an alternative to the Arecont Omnis, if for nothing but the ability to add a date/time stamp to the actual video at camera level.