Swann - Master Series Home 8-Channel 6-Dome Camera 4K HD Indoor/Outdoor PoE Wired 2TB HDD NVR Security Surveillance System - White

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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Sharp video, good app, sturdy cameras

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  The first thing I noticed when I unboxed this system was the build quality of the cameras. The bases and swivels are cast metal and I believe the camera bodies are as well. They feel much better than my current plastic bullet cameras. I like that they use just a single cable per camera so only one cable to fish. The kit came with 60 ft of cable and a weather resistant cable connector cover for each camera. I see a small hole on the camera face that I assume is a mic and I have the audio set to max volume but I’m not getting audio yet. Must be another setting I need to adjust. The kit states that it has color night vision but I see that requires an external light source, like floodlights on your house. Without that, they only operate with the IR light that’s built in. The IR night vision is actually pretty good, the beam is a little wider than a spotlight and I believe the claimed 130 ft range is accurate. I initially took a camera out in my yard on a pitch black night to see how bright it was and uploaded the video to that large video site, if you search “Swann SONVK-876804D-US“ I think you should find it. That site compresses the video so I don’t think you can rate the image quality fairly but you can at least see the beam pattern. One thing that concerned me as I was searching reviews of this system before I got it was one reviewer that said you could not mask out certain areas of the view to block motion detection. We have a large plant by our front door that blows in the wind and will trigger a motion detector easily. I found that by navigating to setup/display/privacy zone I could add up to four boxes to exclude areas of the camera view to ignore motion detection. The shape of the zone is a square but you can click and drag it to make a rectangle of any size and combine up to four rectangles per camera to cover an irregular shaped object. I found connecting to the app to be easy. Just have to scan a QR code on the NVR. I have an existing Swann system so I already had the app and I was able to add this new system. Haven’t had any issues with accessing the system while I’m at home or away.

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  This review is from Swann - Master Series Home 8-Channel 4-Dome Camera 4K HD Indoor/Outdoor PoE Wired 2TB HDD NVR Security Surveillance System - White

  Posted 2 years ago by Stephen H

• Rated 3 out of 5 stars

  What is “master” about it?

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 25 Contributor

  I’ve had many security camera systems and have reviewed at least 4 other Swann systems and this one just feels like they went backwards. First off, let me get some positives out of the way. I really like the new dome style cameras. They look less gawky than the bullet cameras, feel very solid and work really nice for compact areas like indoors or on your porch. They feel more secure with their mounting style, once you figure it out, as there are no directions anywhere on how to install them. The IR lights on these cameras are really bright, however, pointed to the center so it looks like a hot spot on night vision. The image is pretty sharp and the colors really pop during the day, but you can tell it is upscaled 4K. See attached images. Compared to previous systems, you can at least see 3 cameras on the mainstream at the same time or playback up to 3 at the same time. Like their other systems, there are not enough resources to view more, while the others could only display two. You can view them all on the substream, the lower resolution, on a single screen though. Now, the reason I feel they went backwards and question the label of “master”. Well, their other NVR systems allow for 2 way audio, this setup only allows for recording, once you enable it. These cameras have only 80 degrees field of view, compared to 90 on their bullet cameras. There is no white LED that could alert others of the camera or trip color night recording. Their other systems had the analytics ability to do face recognition or human & vehicle detection, this NVR has the menu option but states “Connected IPC does not support Intelligent Analytics”. It only records by default PIR motion and Alarm. So, you end up with a lot of general alerts for the flag waving in the wind or a car driving by, you have no idea which one it might be. As with their other systems, I do not like the reliability of their PIR motion detection. You might catch something as it will pre-record, or you might miss the most important part because it just decided there wasn’t enough motion. I prefer enabling the “normal” recording so that you catch all activity, 24/7, or you can do less on the schedule if you want. This way you won’t miss anything, but then playback becomes a bit harder on the mobile app and you will only have about 7 days worth of recording on the HDD. Speaking of the mobile app, I find it slow and only useful for viewing live video. The notifications, if you select them, take you to live view, which if you click on it the moment it pops up is good. However, with the amount of false notifications you are likely to get, you will probably go to check on it later and you have to go to playback and find which event it might have been. That is provided the events even load for you as it might take a few refreshes. Then, all the options in the application are pretty limited. The only one that gives more control is modes, where you can change motion sensitivity by editing each one. The rest are all just for information, like naming the channels, removing the device or getting device details. If the cameras supported it, then you could do 2 way audio through the live view as well, but these do not. They do offer Secure+ Plans which claim to give smarter alerts and rich notifications, but then the small print says “Swann Wireless or Wi-Fi Cameras”. So, essentially you would be subscribing for extended warranty and insurance on the device. You can, however, set up cloud storage through Dropbox, but the 2TB HDD should be plenty and you can always back up clips to an external drive. Overall, I don’t want to say this is a bad system, as it does a fair job in capturing decent video and personally I like NVR systems better than wireless or DVR as you can get continuous recording. However, besides the style of the camera, I don’t have anything that would make me recommend this system over others, even some of Swann’s previous models.

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  This review is from Swann - Master Series Home 8-Channel 4-Dome Camera 4K HD Indoor/Outdoor PoE Wired 2TB HDD NVR Security Surveillance System - White

  Posted 2 years ago by DavidJr

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Eyes in the Night

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  The Swann - Master Series 8-Channel, 4-Dome Camera, Indoor/Outdoor PoE Wired 4K UHD 2TB HDD NVR Security System is a complete security system with night time clarity. It is a quick and simple setup using the Swann Wizard. It walks you through the process of setting up your security system. Downloading the Swann Security app makes it handy to view your cameras, BUT it really helps on setting the camera views! Really the hardest part of the setup is actually fishing the lines from your security junction to where camera wires run through the attic to the camera locations. It's nice to have fish line poles for running wires and fishing for wires. Once the wires are ran, mounting the cameras and setting the angles are pretty easy, although the camera angle only covers about 80 degrees, I believe. The dome cameras do look more subtle and higher end than the standard bullet style. What impressed me was the night time videos. I watched events that were recorded at night, and at first I was wondering what it was recording, but a second later, you see headlights or shadows and it records the motion. So, basically you see the whole video of the event. Not just seeing the middle or the end of said recording event. That was impressive to me. Although it is called the Master Series Swann security system, it is not intimidating to set up and install. Very impressed at the night time video quality and more so during the day.

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  This review is from Swann - Master Series Home 8-Channel 4-Dome Camera 4K HD Indoor/Outdoor PoE Wired 2TB HDD NVR Security Surveillance System - White

  Posted 2 years ago by LongRX7