I was looking at $200 cameras that were PoE, designed for outdoors, and had an IR emitter to protect my car that someone tried to steal from my driveway.
Ended up with a pair of reolinks for $120, the spec was a bit less, but I got two cameras. I pointed them from the top of my garage door to both sides of the car, which doubly illuminated the driveway. The red illumination rings on the cameras were easy to spot from the sidewalk, hopefully preventing another attempt. The image quality was great, color during the day, B&W after dark. Ended up using it surprisingly often. Deliveries, kid pickup/drop off, mailman, identifying whatever big truck was visiting our dead end street, and ended up seeing more wildlife than I expected. Even at night I could clearly see the black seat belts inside a black car with a black interior.
I run a separate network for the camera so they can't talk to anything buy my server, so I'm not particularly worried about their network security and I like that the cameras are PoE and not wifi. Sure open source would be better, axis is decent on that front. They run a linux distro, you can ssh in, and even modify the linux distro with an overlap to customize it however you want.
Ended up with a pair of reolinks for $120, the spec was a bit less, but I got two cameras. I pointed them from the top of my garage door to both sides of the car, which doubly illuminated the driveway. The red illumination rings on the cameras were easy to spot from the sidewalk, hopefully preventing another attempt. The image quality was great, color during the day, B&W after dark. Ended up using it surprisingly often. Deliveries, kid pickup/drop off, mailman, identifying whatever big truck was visiting our dead end street, and ended up seeing more wildlife than I expected. Even at night I could clearly see the black seat belts inside a black car with a black interior.
I run a separate network for the camera so they can't talk to anything buy my server, so I'm not particularly worried about their network security and I like that the cameras are PoE and not wifi. Sure open source would be better, axis is decent on that front. They run a linux distro, you can ssh in, and even modify the linux distro with an overlap to customize it however you want.