I appreciate there are many what camera posts and i’ve looked through most of them. The cameras from different brands all seem to be of good quality an do the job. However i do see the requirement a lot for cloud access.
I currently have 6 next cameras at home. these all work well but i am trying to reduce costs. Im currently paying £160 a year for the ability to access these 24/7 I feel it would be more useful if i can have them stream to my HA and then access that?
I currently pay nabucasa for remote access and am happy with that.
It appears that both reolink (appear to be best featured) and tapo (seem best value) both allow me to save the video locally.
However im confused in that there are offers for cloud storage. im not bothered about them phoning home but i am bothered about them requiring a subscription at a later date?
Check out Reolink cams using their HomeHub for local storage. There will be no subscriptions costs and the cams are still accessible outside your network via HA or Reolink’s app/client.
We use the Reolink RLN-8 NVR (6tb) to power and locally store our POE camera video feed 24/7. We use the Reolink Mobile app to access the cameras on cellular. Not sure if we could add cloud storage to the NVR cameras, I’ve never looked. We have 1 WiFi Reolink camera that I intended to add to the NVR but during setup but added it as its own separate device by mistake. I didn’t care enough to fix it so I just let it record to the 64gb SD card inside. We can access that camera using the same Reolink app over cellular. BUT, that camera does have an optional cloud storage subscription I’ve never looked into.
I don’t know what prices are anymore. I bought my system three years ago. And bought it refurbished from Reolink’s eBay account and it was 7 POE 4K bullet cameras, NVR, 6tb HD, and 300’ outdoor rated ethernet cost me $850 USD. $250 of that was just the Ethernet cable and to this day I know I overpaid.
For me, $121 a camera with lifetime free storage, remote access was worth it.
If cost is the main driver just buy a generic camera that can do RTSP streams and use frigate. You can easily get a camera for £20 that will stream 1080p in good enough quality for CCTV use. Frigate will need a TPU such as google coral to work. This will do everything and more than most cameras can do, all local and no subscription.
My generic cameras have been performing fine for nearly 4 years now. Yes they don’t do 4k, but I can’t really see the need for that.