This is Dahua’s mini IR dome. It’s is sort of a cross between the easy aiming and flat glass front lens of a bullet camera but with the compactness of a dome. While it has the same sensor as the mini IR bullet, the ipc-hfw2100, it seems to do better in low light at night and better with white balance issues common to that camera. 

Main Features

1. 1/3” 1.3Megapixel progressive scan Aptina CMOS

2. H.264 & MJPEG dual-stream encoding

3. Max 15fps @ 1.3M (1280×960) or 30fps @ 720P (1280×720)

4. 3.6mm fixed lens (6mm, 8mm optional)

5. Day/Night IR Cut Filter

6. IR LED working distance 20m

7. IP66 Rated Outdoor Bullet

8. Powered by PoE

9. Smartphone apps available

Overall, for the money I like this little dome. It’s more discrete and secure than a bullet camera, especially if you want to use indoors. The aiming mechanism is so simple, works on 3-axis and setting it is as easy as pushing to where you want it to go. Installation was pretty easy too. You twist the bezel off, attached with a few screws and twist the bezel back over it.

This is what the web interface looks like when you first log in. There’s options to take a snapshot, manually record, chose a stream and more.

Across the top are tabs for Live (live viewing), Set (configure the camera), Alarm (setup alarms) and Logout. When you click on the Set tab, it takes you this configuration screen where you can change the image properties.

Now onto the images, how well does this camera perform. I mounted the camera at two places, one at the front of my garage, under the eave,and in my backyard because they represent different lighting situations. This camera had the 3.6mm lens which is fairly wide and covered most of front of my home.

Here’s an early morning day shot in 1.3MP mode. The image is clean, crisp, white balance is good, much better than the mini bullet. As before, you can click on the image to view the original size image from the camera.

Here’s a day shot in 720P mode with 16:9 aspect ratio taken mid-day

At night this camera surprised me.  I was expecting it to be just like the mini-bullet but actually it did better in low light to the point that in front of my house, not one time during the night did it switch to night mode yet retained a clear image with low noise.

I then tried in my dark backyard and it sort of disappoints here. You can’t ignore the fact that it has a lot less IR LEDs than it’s mini-bullet brother. Also, despite the flat glass, there’s some IR light bleed.

I uploaded day and night videos to YouTube. To see them at the full 720P resolution, you must click on the gear icon and select 720P resolution and then click on the icon with 4 corners to see the video full screen.