I recently researched outdoor security cameras for our home and discovered that the the outdoor security camera market is a _complete_ mess.

My requirements were, I thought, fairly simple. Good quality outdoor camera which uploaded motion off-site (cloud, FTP, whatever).

Apparently, that doesn't exist.

Most of the cameras fail the first requirement. Terrible video quality, tiny field of view, poor build quality that results in frequent failures, and/or bad track records with security bugs.

Some do okay on the first mark, but fail on the second. It's beyond me why most security cameras don't have at least _some_ ability to upload motion off-site. I have an Amcrest indoor camera, really terrible, but at least it will automatically upload motion to an FTP server. But it seems none of their outdoor cameras upload motion; only still images. !?

Hikvision cameras were frequently recommended as capable and good quality, but they were riddled with security bugs. Totally unacceptable for a _security_ camera.

Nest, from the article, has good build quality, and AFAIK no serious security issues. But no normal American can actually use them, because for all intents and purposes they require ~2 Mbps of constant upload bandwidth per camera. Google being Google requires the cameras upload all footage, 24/7 to their servers. For decent quality, that means 2Mbps of bandwidth. There's really no other way to use the cameras without doing that constant upload. Most Americans don't have much upload bandwidth. I only have 10 Mbps egress, which means each camera eats 20% of my bandwidth. Totally useless.

Not to mention uploading 24/7 live footage of your home to Google, and paying hundreds of dollars per year in subscription fees for the privilege.

Cleverloop sells a system similar to Nest, but they they do all their machine learning motion detection and such locally. So you don't have to burn upload bandwidth, and you don't have privacy issues. Plus no subscription fees. But their cameras are unreliable, 720p, limited FoV, and not standards compliant so you can't use them outside of Cleverloop's system.

There was another system, who's name I forgot, which was all around good and met all the requirements ... except that apparently all the cameras have a bug where they often delay recording after motion detection for 5 seconds or so. Wow...

All the other systems fall into either poor quality, buggy software, security issues, etc, etc.

Basically, for the average consumer there are _no_ good options. I'm an engineer so I have the advantage of getting my hands dirty customizing things but most people don't have that option. Most people need a system that just works. It's totally crazy that such a thing doesn't exist. And personally, I'd rather not spend my time building a custom camera system. I, too, want something that just works.

Well, after days of research the solution I landed on: I bought some plain ole PoE cameras from Costco. They have good specs (4MP, 90 FoV) and I trust Costco to vet for quality. Still fairly cheap (~$150 per camera). I bought an old small form factor Dell, Core i5, 2TB storage for $250 to act as the local recording station. I'll slap some software on there, ZoneMinder or Blue Iris or something, and hopefully get it to detect motion and upload those clips to the cloud. The cameras will also automatically upload snapshots over FTP (seriously why can't they just upload video!?) as at least a redundant system.

I'm just aghast at how difficult and cruddy all of this is.