Vivotek FD8134V review

Vivotek’s FD8134V raises the bar for affordable external surveillance: its weather-proof IP66-rated unit costs only £224 exc VAT. Its metal shell and polycarbonate dome have the highest impact-protection rating of IK10, meaning that they can handle a 20-joule impact – equivalent to dropping 5kg from 400mm.

The camera uses a 1/4in RGB CMOS sensor, and its eight IR emitters mean it’s ready for 24-hour operation. The shell is fixed to the camera body with three Torx screws, which you’ll need to remove, as the lens body must be positioned manually.

The Ethernet, power and I/O cables are protected in a 300mm sheath, so it’s ready to go straight outside. Finally, the camera is 802.3af PoE compliant; we had no problems powering it from a standard injector and the lab’s HP ProCurve 2424M-PWR switch.

Installation is wizard-assisted, and it displays URLs for accessing the cameras locally, over the internet and from a mobile, where it will use a lower resolution of 176 x 144 pixels. The homepage opens with the live view, and we found image quality to be good.

Focus is too soft for fine details, but colour balance in natural and artificial light is clean, and movement is conveyed smoothly. A 4x digital zoom is available, but quality breaks down, so it won’t be of use when surveillance of distant objects is required.

We tested by monitoring the local car park: at maximum zoom, distant car number plates couldn’t be read and facial recognition was impossible. However, the claimed 10m range for the IR emitters is acceptable – when the lights go out, the level of detail was quite high within this perimeter.

Motion detection is configured in different windows with their own sensitivity settings. It can be active during the day or night, and triggers used to send images to email, FTP and web servers, or the camera’s SD card slot.

Vivotek’s FD8134V offers plenty of useful features, and its compact body is as hard as nails.