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This is a good review, thanks for writing it up.
Agreed on the "nothing's perfect" vibe here, it's always about the trade-offs.
John Lewis are replacing my faulty Nest Camera so I'll carry on with them a while longer, but your review is interesting enough that I may just buy a single camera to do a comparison against the Nest ones for the unzoomed image and field-of-vision for the one that I have in my living room that I'm unsatisfied with.
Velocio-
FWIW just had an email back from unifi RMA department. It took 26 days for my return to get through customs and royal mail.
Within 20 minutes of recieving it the replacement camera was placed on back order. So it has somehow irretrievably bricked it's self and there is no stock to replace, although I am grateful that it will be replaced.
yafe
Sorry for the late reply had a busy lunch.
So my experience with the unifi cameras has been overall good. I must say upfront that they work for me and obviously your mileage may vary.
I came to it with 2 unifi access points. One for the garden and one for the house. Everything worked great but part of the influence that pushed me down the unifi camera route was something to run a controller on full time and have more data and settings to play with. Previously I was running the web controller as and when I needed to tweek something.
I started down the path at looking for dream machine pro to run everything, add some cameras that id always planned on getting from some brands range and get some control over firewall/routing.
After my research coming up less than favourable for the firewall side of unifi I went for a cloud key gen 2 plus, 2x G4 bullet and 3x G3 flex. All linked up with an 8 POE lite and a 16 POE lite switch, to power it all and connect it up.
I got lucky with the stocking and got it all in one go. Originally struggled a little to adopt everything into my existing set up but as I only had 2 access points I didn't fight too hard and instead started again and reset the APs and rebuilt it all around the cloud key. Installed the apps on my phone which has been great compared to the web controller.
I have the cloud key set up in my loft of a 1930 semi with the 16 POE lite feeding all the cameras. I have one G4 bullet to the front of the house and one 2 the side as it's a corner plot, this give me about 160 degrees of visibility of the accessible part of my property. Quality wise I have them set to 1080 as I'm running the original 1Tb HDD that comes with the cloud key. I find this adequate as it's good enough to indetify people at the 9ft install height and I can record for about 10 days with the front set to constant recording and the other 3 cameras I'm using set to motion (note 3 other cameras).
The quality does degrade if you zoom in obviously as it's digital not optical so it's important to take into account your field of view when purchasing. My use case is partly detterant/peace of mind. Partly checking on couriers and local foxes. I'm not interested in reading registration plates etc.
I find the night time IR to be surprisingly good for a built in unit. The front camera illuminates my 5mx10m drive completely. The side has a bigger patch to light up and the angle needs a tweek as it is slightly catching the street light in its periphial and isn't as illuminated as a result.
The 3 G3 Flex cameras - for the price and the size these are fab. I have a baby and a 3 year old and have integrated these as baby cams fitted in the corner above the door of 2x double bedrooms. They give a good viewing angle of the majority of the room of everything other than directly below. The IR is enough to light the whole room and the detail at 1080 is good enough for my use case.
We had a medical thing with my eldest which whilst she has recovered from we as parents arent over so a couple times a night will flick the app on, check on her and close it. Using the digital zoom feature, zooming in about 5 metres to a face is clear enough for us to tell everything is fine whilst the image is a bit noisy at night.
I'm really happy with the whole lot, mostly because of how well Integrated it all is. I have my network app and protect app and can control everything from my phone. It looks slick and it always works. I am reasurred that everything is local and tucked away in the loft. I don't worry so much about the crime aspect as I live in a quiet postcode but like to see what is going on around the property when away from home.
The bad bits.
I'm sure you can find better equipment for less money. I didn't really look into it due to the integration to my set up. I don't have a 'smart home' there is zero Amazon/Google/Facebook type IoT in my house except phones which are pretty locked down. So there is nothing to bring me towards that side of integration.
Usual unifi setup things. As mentioned before my decision to start again as I was adding more than I had made it easier but I am sure it would have took a while to set up without.
The note about 2 camera above - I bought a pack of 3 G3 flex as they had the 3 pack in stock, I only had immediate use for 2 but planned to maybe add the 3rd to cover the rear of the property at a later date. I adopted the camera with the rest, tested it and then left if for a few months unused. I recently came to get it out as I wanted to temporarily rig it up somewhere else in the house and it wouldn't display on the protect app.
I think the camera fell behind a few updates whilst disconnected and had issues trying to get back up to speed with the protect software. I tried to reset, pin hole and re adopt and I think the camera has bricked it's self as it's completely invisible to the network/software. I filed an RMA request to ubiqiti really hoping for some way to reset at home. I didn't get a response for around 30 days, in the end they have approved an RMA but I have to post it back to Czech Republic at my cost. Which is where it is now. It's not ideal and getting support is very tricky.
If you want to know anything more specific let me know and I'll try to answer it.