Dahua ADI Partnership Accelerates Race To The Bottom

I assume they will have to charge a premium for the Dahua branded products as Dahua will have to have a USA based tech support team (ewww scary). If they have no USA based tech support, this whole idea will be over before its started. If they charge the same amount or less for Dahua products than Flir, there goes all of Dahua's OEM customers.

Only way this will work out for everyone involved is if Dahua charges premium prices for their branded.

For the few integrators in the know, this may just be another distributor to find the exact model you are looking for. Often, I find, that not every distributor of Dahua (OEM or otherwise) stocks a wide variety of their products. I don't know if this is due to the distributor cherry picking the products, or if it is driven by Dahua.

For instance, Dahua recently released their 4MP Dome with motorized zoom (IPC-HDBW5421E-Z). This particular camera has a three bolt pattern to mount it to a pendant cap (PFA-101). Their previous model of this size had a four bolt pattern. So, instead of making a new cap with 3 holes, they adapted the four hole cap with seven holes.

That's all fine, until you realize they DIDN'T CHANGE THE PART NUMBER! So, the old four hole cap is PFA-101 and the new seven hole cap is still PFA-101. In the Dahua literature it has "2nd" next to the part number, signifying that there is a second revision of the PFA-101. But, the box doesn't show this.

Now, the tricky part is getting your distributor to stock the new PFA-101 when he hasn't yet sold out of the old PFA-101!!

My point here is that with ADI as a distributor too, I am going to be more likely to find the exact part I need. I have a project being held up by a $10 pendant cap!

At the ADI show:

From experience, dahua has proven to be a little on the high end of the price spectrum, and my distributor tried pushing them on me and i told him to keep on looking and found some whitelabel brand of them much cheaper.

The name had "dog" in it and i cant remember it right now.

I used a few no-brand dauha cameras on a job, mostly the motorized 3mp bullets and domes and found the hik equivilents to produce a much better image simply because I had to replace a few dahuas and went with LTS and KTC Omni and was able to compare side by side on the same nvr...they seemed sharper and more vivid.

So here's a thought: If indeed the typical ADI slammer did not know that some FLIR and Honeywell products were actually Dahua, now they are likely to put two and two together.

Therefore, whatever their feelings may have been about those FLIRwell products (products only, not necesarily support etc) will largely transfer to Dahua.

Of course, this may be good or bad, but it accelerates greatly the timeframe in which one can establish a brand, since in effect you are telling people, "You already love and use us, you just didn't know it!"

Regarding Dahua's lack of brand recognition, their logo is problematic:

It looks like alhua or @hua but certainly not Dahua. I'm sure there's a story or reason behind their logo, but readability should be the priority.

If you're trying to go beyond ODM/OEM relationships and brand yourself, start with a legible logo. I wonder how many people walked past their large booth at ISC West not knowing it was Dahua.

ADI is now widely stocking Dahua. From our checks, Dahua is on the second tier of stocking (i.e., not as big as Hikision, FLIR, W-Box, etc. but still notable).

Also, related: