Did you see the recent videos that "The Hook Up" did about setting up a home security camera system? He talks about coverage, resolution and night vision.
Yes I have seen yesterday evening some of his video's. But need to keep an eye on mywallet, to keep the lady of the house happy 
So I had really hoped the C500 would do the job...
That is a pitty... But I appreciate it very much that you share your experiences here!!!!
So I conclude from this that a 5Mp cam is not enough for home surveillance, but I need to look for a 4K cam. Which ReoLink do you recommend?
Well this was a VERY important feature, that I forgot to add to my requirements list in the first post above. E.g. the IR leds (during the night) attract bugs which causes false alarms. Can you please also share some experiences about object detections (e.g. persons)? Or is it perhaps better to do this on the server-side instead of in the camera?
Wouldn't be hard to put up a separate panel of IR LED's.
Just a quick test for you. These are the images of still photos saved from each camera's web interface:
First is the C800:
The C500 is right below it, you can see the black hood in the C800 image. This is what this camera sees:
I think you can see the difference. Maybe if you zoom into on the pine tree on the left, you can sort of make out the individual needles on C800, but it is only a blurred outline on the C500. So there is a difference. Probably the other pro I would highlight is that the widescreen aspect ration works better in this setting. I am getting more side-to-side view which makes sense here, on the other camera I am getting way too much sky (alignment could be better of course).
Just as a bonus, you can probably see the Reolink 510WA on the far side beyond the driveway. Here is a picture of that looking back. You can make out the two Annke cameras left to the garage door:
I have to say vehicle detection does make a big difference. I wanted to make some automated comparison with my Reolink. Unfortunately Reolink is not publishing the object detection results over onvif, so the onvif even gets called for regular image motion detection and object detection as well. Reolink told me that they will add that to the Onvif event payload in the future.
I think I have seen a few cats detected as persons, so it is certainly not perfect.
I hope this helps somewhat.
I realized that the images above are not full resolution, so you can access the originals here: Camera test - Google Drive
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You have no idea how much... Thanks!!!!!!!!
I will do the same in the evening (if I don't forget). And also added a Google Drive link above with the originals.
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That is (again) very kind of you!! I am wondering if it is possible to recognize a face in the dark. Very curious...
Thats no so easy, if you have a wide angle lens then there are not many pixels at a distance. If the subject is close to the camera then the IR light tends to over expose the face to a white blob
Perhaps @nygma2004 can pose for you in the night pictures at different distances from the cameras 
I started out playing with a Pi running motioneye, but decided to go for a dedicated DVR in the end
They are not too expensive these days. Its designed to record muliple cameras at high resolution 24/7.
I can still interact with it to grab images, alarms etc over the network to add some NR goodness.
I uploaded a few more images to the Camera test - Google Drive
I did a test roughly from around 7m and also 15m away from the camera. When I took the pictures when only one of the camera was powered (so only its IR was working).
I took one extra picture with the C500 when the Reolink 510 on the opposite side was also on, so you can see the impact on picture quality of and additional IR source.
I think you should print off a life-sized version of you from that 5m C800 pic. Put that in your driveway, it would be enough to scare away anyone and anything!! 
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A few pictures tell more than 1000 words. Thanks!!!
So at 7 meters the C500 is rather blocky, while the C800 is much more recognizable:
At 15 meters both are unrecognizable:
So from this I would conclude that a 4K cam would be required for home surveillance, instead of a 5Mb one.
Your pictures were "illuminating" for me
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I tried calling annke to clarify some details and it seems that they may not be available for a bit due to the start of the chinese new year. Their cams are priced a little better than amcrest and I would get one for testing.
If they did take away h.264, that would make it difficult to re-stream the video to a browser without re-encoding on the server.
I was just doing some testing with my cams using the h.265 option. It can play in my chrome browser using the built-in amcrest ui, but the h.265 crashes and reverts my sub stream which is set to use h.264. There are some js loaded that is re-encoding the video in the browser to make it playable and it seems to struggle.
When re-streaming the h.265 using my nodes and ffmpeg, mp4frag, I am able to play h.265 only in safari on mac and also safari on iphone using socket.io, hls.js, or native hls. Chrome and firefox on mac do not support that codec natively. I think i read that edge on windows may play h.265, but have not tested.
I am curious if the c500 supports an iframe interval as low as the fps, for example, if setting the fps to 15, can you also set the iframe interval to 15. That would allow for 1 second segment durations and can cut down on some video viewing delay.
screenshots from the amcrest:
Hey Kevin,
Welcome to our cam party
For me the problem is that I can't find your Amcrest 5Mp cams anywhere in Europe...
Nooooooooooooooooooo... Don't tell me this is true.
I finally convinced my wife to buy some Annke C800 cams for my birthday on 16 februari. Currently there is a winter deal (till 15 februari) so you can buy them for 64 EUR (incl. VAT).
Read somewhere that the C800 (in contradiction to the C500) doesn't support h.264 to be able to compress the high resolution images more sufficient. But not sure whether that is correct.
Anyway we won't get this solved in two weeks, so there goes the winter deal 
The screenshot of the annke UI is identical to hikvision cams, so I assume they are probably just rebranded hikvisions. I thought amcrest was hikvision also. There's a hikvision node that lets you trigger flows based on event, like line crossing. The hikvision cam I have requires ActiveX to access advanced features. Maybe thats been addressed in newer models, but hik hasn't updated the firmware for my cam. You can can find hiks cheap on ebay, since the us government banned them out of concern they are backdoored.
Yes the menu is the same as Hikvision, and the cameras look the same too.
Yes in the youtube review link I posted somwhere above, they told that Annke is the consumer product line of Hikvision. It are stripped off versions, and the firmware is updatet with delay.
Makes sense...
That could perhaps explain why I can only buy some models via amazon.com, and not e.g. via amazon.de ...
@BartButenaers I got a response back from Annke regarding H264 support in their C800 cameras:
For the new camera models in C800 series (I91BL/I91BM/I91BN), they only support H.265, not H.264.
While the early model I91BD in C800 supports H.264, it doesn't have a bulit-in microphone.
So there's that.
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Hi folks,
The Hook Up has again release a nice camera review on youtube. In this review he tests and compares 4K camera's from $110 to $1100.
Again Annke,ReoLink and Amcrest end up pretty high, just below the very expensive camera's:
Seems that the ReoLink (RLC-811A) got a firmware upgrade a month ago, so it now has good Onvif support!
Based on this review, I think I am going to have again a look at ReoLink...
So if anybody has some ReoLink experiences, it would nice if they would share it here...
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