Night Owl - 12 Channel 8 Camera Wired 2K 1TB DVR Security System with 2-way Audio - White

These cameras have given us some very clear images in the past that we were very happy with. But before we knew it (less than a year), we started experiencing major issues. Heavy blur or distortion in one camera that came from nowhere and seems to be unfixable. Another stopped working completely one day. Another has a faulty wire and flashes the flash light and beeps if plugged in (essentially also rendering it completely unusable too). We are not expecting a long lifespan for these cameras after the issues we’ve already experienced. In short: Started out good, went downhill quickly.

Replaced my sance cameras with this night owl made in the US and the quality is amazing! I was able to used the same wiring of my old cameras which was good due to I have wiring throughout the attic. Really recommend this caneras

I was refraining from writing a review until more time passed before I found out the limitation of this system. I purchased this setup to replace an older Amcrest system in which one of the cameras failed, deciding to go with an “upgrade” with something newer. The cameras (resolution and night vision) are actually really good, and that’s the only reason I didn’t rate this system 1 star. Where this system severely disappointed was the way in which footage is recorded and stored. First off, there is no way to disable “event based” recording, there is only an option to select “continuous” on top of that. So when one has to go back and look for footage during a particular time window, the duration bar is filled with red lines signifying event based recordings, it is visual overload and I wish there was a way to have only continuous based recording (some of us live in major cities instead of the sticks and therefore there is always movement happening in all camera angles). The biggest design flaw is what happens when the storage space runs out on the HDD, which is basically nothing. The system runs out of space and doesn’t tell you, and there is no option to select for the system to loop back around and start re-writing the oldest footage once it runs out of space. My old Amcrest system had that capability. I found out when I needed to go back and review footage from a few days ago and realized it had nothing saved from the last few days because it ran out of space! I had to manually reformat the HDD! Finally, the last annoyance is having to “log in” with a password when you want to playback or mess with settings, this is very cumbersome when needing to quickly review footage for something that happened moments ago. I understand the purpose is designed with security in mind in case someone gets physical access to the DVR, but there should be an option to disable login requirements. All in all, this system is borderline useless for setting up in an urban/high traffic area, and overall for the lack of ability to automatically re-write over old footage once HDD space runs out. The cherry on top is the system is noticeably louder when information is being written onto the HDD when compared to my old Amcrest system, another slight nuisance at night time since I have the system and monitor setup in my bedroom.