Dahua has been making waves lately with some new products that are outstanding at a price point that’s breaking barriers. The IPC-HFW3200CN is an HD 1080P outdoor bullet camera that uses the Sony Exmor chip to provide sharp vivid color images during the day. At night, the built in IR illuminators work well in combination with the sensors good low light capabilities as well as the camera’s noise reduction to produce very good clean night images in area with little to no light.

Main Features

1. 1/3” 2.0 MP SONY progressive scan Exmor CMOS image sensor

2. High-performance TI DaVinci series DSP

3. H.264/MJEPG video compression and JPEG image capture

4. Supports dual-stream encoding

5. 30fps at 1080P resolution

6. Support true Day/Night with an IR Cut Filter

7. Built-in 3.3~12mm varifocal/F1.4 Auto Iris lens

8. Built-in IR Illuminators with a working distance of 20m

9. Supports Alarm I/O

10. Support up to 32GB Micro SD card for local storage

11. IP66 Water-proof protection

12. Powered by PoE or 12V/24V

13. Smartphone apps available

Overall, this is an impressive camera with very good image quality, good low light performance, well organized menus, and well built that feels solid in your hands.

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 -

Selecting menu choices on the left takes you to various options needed to configure the camera. One of the first settings you may want to change are the TCP/IP network settings. The menus are clean and responsive.

Motion detection areas are cleverly set by clicking boxes to cover or expose the image. The exposed areas can be any shape that you can create using the box grid.

The camera has a varifocal lens (about a 4X manual zoom). To adust the focal length and focus you have to remove two screws to remove the sun shade (tool included), and then carefuly unscrew the black lens cover. Once inside it uses the traditional adjusting wands that are loosened and tightened with a small screw driver.

You may have noticed the rather large pigtail that comes out the back. The big plus here is cable management. When the camera is installed flush on the wall with the attached mount, the camera has a nice clean look. The pigtail does require that you make a hole large enough to feed the pigtail through the wall. The connectors on the pigtail include not only the obvious ethernet outlet, but also video out for field focusing, a reset button and your mic/speaker connectors, 12/24v connector and alarm inputs/outputs.  The following excerpt out of the manual describes what’s there.

Now onto the images, how well does this camera peform. I mounted the camera at the front of my garage, under the eave. With the varifocal lens starting at 3.3mm, it was perfect for viewing the entire front of my home. While at that wide of an angle, you can not ID someone across the street, it was very effective as people approached my front gate or driveway. As with my other reviews, click on the images below to see the full size image, straight from the camera.

I also mounted it at a second location, my backyard to see how it does under different lighting situations. The front of my house gets direct sun most of the day, a challange for some cameras, the rear does not get much sun because of the slope behind the house and patio covers but has higher contrast from shadows.

Now onto the low light night performance. Again, two scenarios, the first is my driveway. Because there’s a street light across the street, the camera would not automatically shift to night mode. This is what it looks like with no IR lighting in day mode.

I was able to set the night mode (B&W and IR cut filter off) by setting a schedule and this is the same image in night mode.

In the backyard night time image, there’s no external lighting, just the built-in illuminators. The lighting is broad and even and did a good job of lighting the area. The noise reduction works well without much detail loss.

The camera lacks the ability to set a max exposure for auto exposure mode. After experimenting with manual exposure settings, I found that in auto mode, the camera does not go beyond a maximum exposure of 1/30th of second. This is typical of what I set cameras to that allow for this setting so I feel it fit’s most needs as it is.

The camera has the capability to capture events and send them to an FTP server. I’m using a Western Digital My Book Live Networked Storage as the FTP server. The camera sends videos and/or snapshots of all motion detects or alarm triggered events to the FTP server and does so effeciently. There’s no provisions to set naming templates. It creates a hierachy of videos by date and by hour with all the videos using a timestamp name under the hour directory. The videos are stored in a propriatary format with a .dav sufix. They provide a simple viewer tool to view the videos and export them as AVI files. The tool worked as expected playing videos without delay and converting them to AVI format in a reasonable amount of time.  There’s no provision to view videos recorder via FTP or to the SD card directly from the camera’s web interface. You can use the included PSS software to view video recorded to the SD card.