Purchase was delivered early and arrived exactly as described.I purchased this system to replace an older system at my house. The quality/clarity of the image is a HUGE improvement over the older cameras. I will agree with another reviewer that it does "white out" faces at night if they get to close to the camera. Fortunately, in my setup most of the cameras are high enough for this not to be an issue. For the few locations where this presented an issue, (i.e. front door), we added a motion detector light which now illuminates the area when someone/something approaches eliminating the "white out" issue. I did not spend any time playing with the camera configuration menu so I am not sure if those settings could be modified to help on this issue.
My hats off to the technical support!!! I called for help and within 20 minutes I received a call back, 30 minutes later I was viewing my cameras on my laptop and my iphone. My knowledge of router configurations is limited, therefore I have spent many hours over the years with different help desks, and this time was by far a superior experience to any other.
Good price, good quality, good technical support.
Installing the cameras was not difficult if you don't mind drilling holes and stringing wiring. Hooking them up to the power box and DVR was pretty straight forward even though the instructions were lacking big time.
Once the cameras were hooked up to the DVR, we noticed how much noise the DVR fan made. This was noted by other reviewers but it is a smooth fan sound which while somewhat intrusive, we find we don't pay much attention to. Great, so now we have all cameras activated and pictures on the DVR. So far so good! That's where the fun began.
We could not figure out how to zoom the cameras or adjust the focus. The little booklet that comes with each camera makes sense only after you've figured out how to do things by some other means. I looked at the very limited number of reviews of these cameras and that is where I found the following important information:
Re ZOOM and FOCUS: !!!!!THE ZOOM AND FOCUS ARE ADJUSTED USING TWO SETSCREWS ON THE BOTTOM OF EACH CAMERA!!!!! They look like they are ordinary fastener nuts of some kind. It turns out they can be rotated with the hex key that is supplied with the cameras to tighten the mounts. Note that manually adjusting the focus is a very sensitive proposition and we ultimately set the cameras up for auto focus.
RE CAMERA SETUP: Again the instructions didn't seem to address this, but as I said earlier, it makes sense after you've sorted it out yourself. The setup is done using a black toggle switch that is located on the wiring that comes already attached to the camera. It looks like a little joystick and has "up", "down" and "left", "right" printed on it. This looks nonsensical until you realize that pushing the toggle stick straight in brings up the setup menu on your DVR monitor. After that it makes sense and you are good to go, although you will need to have someone watching the monitor to let you know what is happening. It's a little tedious but the results are worth it.
We have not finished the setup of all cameras and we note that while the night vision of these cameras exceeds the manufacturer's claims (it's nuts how good they are!!!!!!!!!!!) we find that a person approaching the camera in the dark is lit up so well by the infrared LED's that they are totally whited out. There is no doubt an adjustment for that and when we work that out, I'll update this review.
The next and most important thing for us was setting up the ability to monitor the cameras remotely from our home in British Columbia. While my wife and I are computer literate we are anything but techies. We had figured out that we needed a DDNS (dynamic domain name system) but did not know how to go about setting it up or connecting it to our laptop and DVR. Again the instructions supplied were no help whatsoever.
My wife sent GW an email and they replied with a phone number we could call (626-350-0555). When called they hooked us up with a technician and once she talked to him our problems VANISHED! He took over our computer remotely, got us signed up with a DDNS service of our choice (DYN DNS Pro) and set up everything else we needed. Voila!!!! We can now go to our laptop, type in our server name and bingo, and see the same pictures on our laptop that we can see on our DVR and do it from anywhere.
We want to especially note our appreciation for the assistance of Quyen Nguyen, the technician who assisted my wife. He was friendly, articulate and very professional and man does he know his stuff. GW Security is fortunate to have him to assist its customers. It turns out he is located near Los Angeles, not far from us in the Palm Springs area, so no worries about talking to someone offshore who perhaps does not speak English as well as they should.
In summary, the hardware all seems to be first rate despite a loud-ish fan on the DVR. Now that it's all up and running, it is very impressive. The only AND BIG downside is the failure of GW to retain a qualified technical writer to rewrite their installation and user manuals. With the greatest respect to the individual or individuals who were responsible for GW's current instructions, it is abundantly clear that English is not their first language, with the result that some of the verbiage borders on nonsense.
To GW Security: Please hire a technical writer, you have a great product and you are almost certainly hurting yourself when you frustrate your buyers with terrible documentation!
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