Security Camera System: firstrend Wireless Cameras for Home Security 1080P 8CH with 4 pcs 2MP Cam Full HD 1TB HDD 24/7 Recording Surveillance Night Vision Motion Alert APP CCTV

After a 4:am visit from LVMPD regarding suspicious activity on my street and neighborhood, I spent several hours researching security camera surveillance systems. After determining my needs and many other factors including NOT needing fancy bells and whistles. Just a solid, reliable, functional, simple and affordable security camera system and the fact that it came with a 2T hard drive didn't hurt my feelings. Most of the others were 1T for about the same price. It came down to three candidates. I'm so glad I chose the "Firstrend 8CHL Wireless NVR System". Mainly because the cameras are factory linked to the NVR before they're shipped. Truly is Plug & Play! You'll definitely need an HDMI Monitor or TV to get started. I just happened to have an old 2008 21" 1080i TV that I could use as a monitor. (See Pics). I spread everything out in my home office, plugged everything in, followed a few simple instructions and BAM! there it was. 4 very clear images on the monitor! Couldn't have been happier! Now the real work begins. These are powered, hard wired cameras. 110vac power supply to each camera is needed. The cameras themselves were very simple to mount but It will take some thought, enginuity and a bit of craftyness if you are like me and didn't have a power supply anywhere near where I wanted to mount the cameras. As you can see by the pics, I managed to get power to all of them. Just took a couple days of climbing through the garage attic, pulling wire and mounting elec. boxes etc... but it was truly worth the work! Once everything was installed and powered up I turned on the monitor and BAM! once again the images just lit up. The daytime images are clear and crisp, the night images (although black and white) are also very clear as well. A little adjusting on the camera angles and my setup was perfect! Now it was time to download the software to my desktop. Windows 10, no problem. Mac desktop. still can't get the software to download, Stupid Apple thing I guess. Proprietorial POS won't accept dmg files without dropbox or something like that. I do have a call into tech and will let my wife handle that. It's her crApple. The apps on our phones were a snap and simple to use. My android and her iphone came right up no problemo! Still learning the ins and outs of setting up and using the many fine intricacies of the software. I decided to leave it hooked to its own monitor. Just simpler to manage the system from there rather than from downloaded software. I was lucky, I had a monitor to start with. You will need one too. Even if you use your big screen HDMI input. Or, Walmart has a great 22" HDMI 1080P monitor for under $100. You won't be able to use your laptop to set up the system either. It's not a monitor. Now, to make a long story even longer, (but this is the sweet part and hence the Headline) System installed complete on sunday. The following tuesday early morning, there was a thief prowling the neighborhood and he was caught on our new system! Our next door neighbor is an LVMPD lieutenant and the punk was caught on our system getting into his car, then moving on to my house and checking the locked doors on my truck using a flashlight to look inside, then moved on across the street where he successfully got into my neighbors truck. Must have seen something he liked cause he jimmied the locked door and spent several minutes in there. then went on to two other neighbors homes checking gates and vehicles before moving out of sight. LVMPD came to our home at 7:30am this morning (yes, I'm writing this review just 12 hrs later) and asked if they could review our video from early this morning. Of course we let them in. The detective was able to pull up a fairly clear image of this punks face, downloaded 30 seconds of the video we had and took it with him. On his way out, he sincerely expressed his gratitude for people like us who take an interest in the security of our homes and neighborhoods. It made his job much more successful. He said with his equipment he would be able to clearly enhance the image and catch this Punk SOB. He would let us know when they do.Bottom Line: Money well spent on a great security camera system. Thank You Firstrend!Now if we could only get it to work on the Mac :) hmmmm

So this is my first security system. When you first start looking for your system, you looking for all the bells and whistles: I want to be able to see all area's of my house, I want to record it, I want to zoom in and talk through it and have them be able to talk back..... Well at least that's what I wanted. I work from home, in the basement and wanted to know what was going outside of my dungeon while I work. Do I really need to get up to check who's at the door? Why is the house quiet, are the kids dead? But what system would work best for me? I have wanted one for years but never followed through because I did not want to run video cords from each camera all the way to the basement, Heeeeell no. So Wireless, yes please! All they need is power plugged into a normal outlet and then they wirelessly send the video to the NVR (DVR) unit where it is being recorded....at my house, no need to be spending money every month to rent some company's cloud somewhere. No monthly fee! But which one? There were at least 5 different brands that I still had on the table at this point. I went with Firstrend in the end because of all the great review about their customer service. And yes you should use email, as yes you are talking to someone across the world, and yes there is a delay of a day or 2.... BUT, It's worth it! Daisy will work with you to make it right! I had a tall order seeing as how my NVR was going to be receiving signals from a basement over a 2,500sq house in the suburbs of Ohio. Some cameras worked great right out of the box. Some cameras worked great sometimes but would lose the signal after a few hours and then I would have to unplug them and plug them back in to make them work again. and 1 camera was just a dud and could not get further than the room I had the NVR in. But, Firstrend Customer Service to the rescue! We tried a few different troubleshooting options, and after those possibilities were removed I was sent 2 wireless boosters to apply to the cameras losing the signal, and a replacement for the camera that was a dud. No forms, no hassle, just what was your amazon order number, what address to send them to, done, express mail, Return anything, naw, don't worry about it! YES! Thank you for making this easy! and in the end I have a working system that I am happy with. I would suggest getting the 4 camera system to try it out and you can always acquire more cameras later. There is Motion Sensing tech on the cameras but I have not found the sweet spot on the sensitivity scale to make it text my phone for kids running with sticks at each other in he driveway but ignore differences in tree shadows, however I think that might be a difficult task for any system. The NVR interface and the App interface are decent, not great, not crap, but I'm happy with it. My next step is to try and share the app to my wife's phone so we both have access, but I know there is some trick to it, as the company is trying to protect you from hackers. But it can be done. I also thought I would like the scheduled recordings for some of the time and then just motion alerts for the rest of the time, but so far I have just stayed with Record everything all the time and no alerts. Sure, it won't protect me from invading clowns spun out on bath salts as they trigger the motion sensor, but better than being texted every 5 mins that the flies/mosquitos are always checking out the camera's built in red light for night vision. Product, I would give 3-4 starts; but man that customer service making it easy for me to make sure everything actually works and no risk? 5 big a$$ stars!