Amcrest UltraHD 4K (8MP) Outdoor Security IP Turret PoE Camera, 3840x2160, 98ft NightVision, 125° FOV, IP67 Weatherproof, MicroSD Recording (256GB), IP8M-T2599EW-AI-V3 (White)

I own two of these and use them with Blue Iris. The software integration is simple and has been very reliable. Streaming rate is adequate for 15 fps on both main and sub stream. Image quality is excellent during the day, and seems to be very good during the night, but that is deceptive: the clear static picture you see is achieved at the expense of massive smoothing of the pixelated image. This becomes apparent whenever anyone walks through the field of view at night, all you see is a "comet" with a blob for the face and a blurry tail. I tried to experiment with the amount of 3D and 2D smoothing that the web interface provides, but to achieve realistic motion capture in the dark I had to sacrifice image quality so much that the pixelation and digital noise made the image unusable anyway. Long exposure mode showed promise but I had to extend the exposure to the point of reaching the frame rate, and also had trouble having the camera switch between night and day mode. That resulted in the long exposure mode extending into daylight, saturating the sensor and whiting out the image. The IR illumination only seems to blur the image instead of making it better, so I turned it off. Note that the camera is not even in a particularly dark area, there are 4 garage night lights lighting up the driveway that it is looking at. So that is a little disappointing. But that said, my other brand of consumer camera that starts with R performs more or less the same in the dark, and much worse in all other aspects with Blue Iris, so I will not complain. But take the "starlight" label on the box with a grain of salt. You probably need a $700 camera for that to be true.The second one I have looks at an area under a street light. That one is doing better at night, which makes me think that the IR from the street lamp helps it a lot (the garage lights are LED, so they probably are lacking in the IR range). So if you stick with these cameras, you may want to add a dedicated IR illuminator over the area it is looking at.During daylight this camera is great. The mic works fine.I wish it had field curvature correction in the firmware as the FOV is very distorted on the edges due to the wide angle. Alas, you don't get that at this price point.Overall I like these cameras and recommend them to people using Blue Iris.

I’ve used many IP cameras, and by far this one is my favorite. This product has strong metal housing, and is great overall quality. I use Blue Iris through my computer as my NVR, and Blue Iris identifies the cameras at 8.3MP which is even a little higher than the advertised 8MP which is great! The picture is crystal clear, and the user interface on the device webpage is very straightforward.Pros:• High quality image• Easy to set up• Amcrest didn’t lock the software for this camera like their competitors do, which means you can use just about any third-party camera software instead of being forced to pay for cloud services, which they do sell but don’t make your camera a useless brick if you don’t pay the extra.• PoE works as expected, but the separate power option works well if you don’t have a PoE switch.• The view is wider than many competitors. This was a major win for this camera.• The night vision is good enough to IR blast my whole front of my driveway and lawn to the street, and you can even make out the neighbor’s house across the street– I wouldn’t say quite 164 feet, but I know that number may be for a specific environment to reach its rating.Cons:• I’ve tested the camera with Alexa with the skill that works for the camera, and it worked a couple times, and then didn’t work a couple times. I don’t entirely blame Amcrest for this one because a lot of Alexa camera apps aren’t working correctly with Alexa yet. Hopefully this will change in the future, but it’s not really a big deal.

In the process of setting up a new surveillance system and testing various software packages and cameras, I bought this 4K camera to be one of the main cameras overlooking my driveway. As soon as I pulled it from the box, I was impressed with how solid it felt. Its base is solid metal and seems like it should hold up to whatever nature throws at it. Aiming the camera is also quite easy since it is not enclosed inside a dome. One Torx screw is all it takes to adjust, and a Torx wrench is conveniently provided in the box.Now, I should disclose that I do have a background in IT, so I promptly ignored all of the software that it came with and set it up by going to the camera's web interface. Therefore, I can't attest to how their bundled software performs. Once I had the camera set up on my network, I was then able to link the camera to the various software I was testing (Blue Iris, Milestone and Zoneminder) quite easily without any fuss at all. It just worked, and the picture quality was great! The camera's web interface was pretty straight forward and felt very similar to some other cheap Anpviz cameras I was testing, so not much to say there.In the end, I ended up settling on Blue Iris for my software package and setting up this camera with a substream to save some CPU. Using the h.265 encoding cut back on my bitrate substantially over h.264 and the quality seemed great with either.The only annoyance I had during the entire setup, installation, and configuration of this camera was in the use of the substream in Blue Iris. Basically, when switching from table view to full screen, there was an enormous delay of about 30-45 seconds before it would switch over to the 4K stream. After quite a while of Google searching, which didn't help much, I ended up manually tracing the issue back to the Smart Codec on the main stream of the camera. Disabling the Smart Codec, completely removed the delay and all has been great since. From what I found online, Smart Codec is supposed to help reduce bandwidth consumption, but in my testing, I did not see any difference with it turned on versus turned off.Other than the Smart Codec giving me some grief, my only other (very slight) complaint, is that the IR illumination at night isn't as bright as some of the other cameras I was testing. I am, however, trying to cover a rather large area with the camera though, so it likely wouldn't be an issue in most cases. In my case, I will soon be adding an IR illuminator to help brighten things up.