 Tommy here from Lauren Systems. And are you looking to buy some surveillance cameras? Maybe you're looking at the specs, the features and the price. How long do those last? What brands hold up over time? That's a really hard thing to figure out. And when you're in forums, sometimes you're missing the context of how many this person had. So obviously people will angrily post when they've installed cameras and they've died, but what if they installed two or three cameras? What about when they've installed $30,000 worth of cameras? And I've actually installed a lot more than that, but I wanted to narrow this video down in scope to answer the question of which brands we use, which ones have held up over time. This is not an exhaustive list of every brand and some durability test on a handful of cameras. This is $30,000 worth or about 300 cameras where we were the installer and these were installed from 2018 to 2022. I see we were the installer because I wanted to remove any time where we did some consulting or other brands we may have bought and shipped to people where they installed them and maybe had problems because installing them properly matters a lot. And if you have someone who doesn't put the seal properly in on a camera, that could lead to problems. So I wanted to eliminate any of the problems that may be caused by third parties and at least control this to be as objective as possible and bring you the statistics. Now this is not sponsored by any of the camera companies, but technically it's sponsored by me because hey, if you like the hires for a surveillance camera project or consulting on surveillance cameras, head over to LawrenceSystems.com there's a hires button right at the top. Sponsorship over. What brands held up? Let's just answer the questions and jump right into it. We'll start with Reolink. They didn't hold up. 68 Reolink spot, six died over time. Now granted, I haven't purchased a Reolink since 2020 and maybe the quality of the camera has gotten better but my history of buying 68 of them and having six of them die was enough to make me go I don't really want to buy anymore. That was enough that kind of just left us going yeah, I don't think this is a good brand. I've also participated in forums and seen people kind of complain about Reolink and say, yeah, there didn't make that great of a camera. Next one is on my list, but also on another list and we haven't purchased any of these in a while since the list came out, which is gonna be HickVision. But out of the 64 HickVision cameras we bought most all of these were for a school who had a lot of HickVision cameras already and those HickVision cameras have held up extremely well. Actually zero died out of 64 cameras. That's a pretty good number and I like that number but I know since the list came out in 2022 the announcement that HickVision cannot be used under a lot of different circumstances means well, we're not installing anymore of them at that school anymore. These were all installed prior but we haven't had a single call about them failing and that's kind of impressive. So I still think HickVision makes a decent camera if you're looking for home use and you want to connect it it's probably not a bad idea. I don't have any problem with that particular brand but let's go to the ones that we buy the most of because of features and price and quality's been really good which is gonna be Amcrest. Out of 165 Amcrest cameras, one, a single one died. The weather seal on a dome camera, I don't know if it was an installer didn't have it in good or we had a just bad seal and it got wet and died but that's one out of 165 that's less than 1% that died and I'm pretty impressed all the other ones are actually working well. Then we granted we can go back over to real link and say there's been 62 of them that have worked quite a bit over time but when you talk about the way we have to deal with installs the way I have to look at it is we may have to rent a lift, ladder, send a crew out there. Sometimes we are traveling decent amount of distance to go to these places. There's a lot of labor involved in swapping out these cameras and you only want to ever install them and let them work over time at least five or six years before you might expect any degradation or problem maybe longer before you go okay I think that's a good life cycle for them but when they die like within six months and most of the real links died within one year so we had to go out there ourselves out of pocket to fix those that expense was well a pain in the butt. So when you're thinking about that if it's a home and it's just easy to climb up on a ladder and swap it yourself it's not a big deal but when you have to rent a boom lift it's a lot bigger of a deal to do these. Now most all these systems are connected to a Synology Surveillance Station that has been my go to for a lot of these businesses I think they make a excellent platform I've got plenty of videos linked down below for tutorials that does include with the Amcrest cameras which have the AI detection so instead of just triggering on like motion detection they have object detection for vehicle and people and so you can get different types of notices in your Synology based on that and I think this is a real good integration and one of the reasons we do so many Synology and Crest combos for businesses. Now recently Synology has released their own cameras the BC 500 and I've done a review of that I have not finished a longer term review but my confidence is pretty good that Synology is gonna make a quality camera that will hold up over time and I will hope to be deploying more of those in the future because they're not on any special do not use lists. Now the final mention I'll do is Ubiquiti we used to install a lot of Ubiquiti systems we don't install as many anymore but I still think it's a good platform it just really locks you into their ecosystem that being said I didn't dive into the numbers quite as deep with Ubiquiti but I will say they have an extremely low failure rate they do make a good quality camera but between pricing of the NVR or unavailability of the NVR and sometimes the cameras we kind of slow down on the installs for them unless someone really wants it I actually think the Synology surveillance station makes a better platform definitely has way more features than Ubiquiti but that's very contextual to when this video is being recorded because Ubiquiti keeps adding features but that's the same side so does Synology so they both keep getting better as products maybe leave some comments down below if you want me to do a side by side comparison and talk about what features are in which model and that might make an interesting video nonetheless, love hearing from you leave your thoughts and comments down below of which cameras you like or whether or not you agree with my assessment of Reolink being not so great HickVision holding up quite well and Amcrest being my go-to camera system for a lot of these setups but if you wanna have a more in-depth discussion about this or other topics head over to my forums and thanks.