Hikvision DS 2. CD2. F I 3. MP Outdoor IR Mini Dome Review Network Camera Critic. This is by far the smallest IR Mini Dome Ive ever reviewed. The actual dome measures about 1 34 and the entire camera sits in the palm of my hand without touching any fingers, thats small. Small usually means sacrificing features and quality, but in this case, this may be one of the better Hikvision cameras I reviewed. Main Features. Megapixel CMOS sensor. H. 2. 64 dual stream encoding. Axis lens adjustments. Micro. SD card slot for up to 6. Time Of Day Dynamic Sky Dome' title='Time Of Day Dynamic Sky Dome' />GB internal recording. P 1. 92. 0 x 1. 08. MP 2. 04. 8 x 1. DayNight IR Cut Filter. IR LED advertised working distance 1. IP6. 6 rated vandal proof. Powered by Po. E or 1. V3. D Digital Noise Reduction. Time Of Day Dynamic Sky Dome' title='Time Of Day Dynamic Sky Dome' />Digital Wide Dynamic Range Backlight Compensation. Smartphone apps available. The camera is small and discrete enough to be used indoors or out and has a clean modern look. Whats amazing to me is whats inside. First the lens is so small they provide a tool to help adjust the lens along its 3 axis range of motion. Then they wrap 1. IR LEDs around the lens. Also included is a micro. The Associated Press delivers indepth coverage on todays Big Story including top stories, international, politics, lifestyle, business, entertainment, and more. Throughout the Festival. For the Birds Mark Anderson, Jony Easterby, Kathy Hinde, Ulf Pedersen, Pippa Taylor Brighton Festival Exclusive. An immersive nighttime. Pagan Burning Man Festival 2016 Features An Orgy Dome For Group Fornication. SD card slot that can hold up to a 6. GB card. I used this during my testing and the recorded video was smooth, no lost frames, playback was very easy to work with and went from event to event with minimal delay between recordings. Feature wise this camera sits in between the lower end DS 2. CD2. 13. 2 I that is not a 3 Axis camera, which practically can only be mounted facing down, like on a ceiling and does not have an internal SD card slot and the DS 2. CD2. 73. 2F IS that has all the features of this camera plus alarm inputs and outputs, two way audio, varifocal lens and more powerful IR illuminators. At the time of this writing, only the 4mm lens version of this camera was available and thats what I tested. Recently, the 2. 8mm lens version was announced and should available by the time you read this. Lens choice is personal, but consider the wider angle the lens, the less pixel density of a suspect or object. In practical terms, in my driveway, in 3. MP mode, I reached what I consider the minimum pixel density to identify someone at a distance of about 2. With a 2. 8mm lens, that shrinks to about 1. Based on industry standards, a suspects face should at least be 8. Indoors, where space is limited by walls, having the 2. This camera came with the 5. This firmware provides some cool features like the ability to write to a NAS via an SMBCIFS mount and the ability to turn off the IR LEDs and still have normal daynight operations. The bugs I ran into with the firmware are that NAS connectivity is spotty. Has worked for some and not others. The other problem I ran into is that it wont work on a Mac as prior firmware releases have. You can downgrade the firmware to prior versions if you have a Mac. I expect these issues to be resolved in the next firmware release, but the downside to firmware releases is they fix one thing, break another, so apply with care. A quick look at the parts. Has the same waterproof RJ4. Hikvision for Po. E and camera connectivity. Also has the 1. 2V connector if you chose not to use Po. E. The backing plate is used to install the camera by screwing the backing plate to where you want it mounted, then attaching the camera to it with 2 screws. The lens adjustment tool is provided to help aim and rotate the lens. Its so small its hard to aim it otherwise. The micro. SD card slots is in the back of the camera as shown. Heres the relative size of the camera next to a pen and next to a Hikvision DS 2. CD2. 73. 2F IS. Also, whats interesting is this camera is an English version, meaning the day of week is now in English as you can see in the initial screen below. It also uses the English firmware releases. My best guess is these were destined for the European market. This does not mean its warrantied or supported by Hikvision USA, but the USA version is also available, albeit for a price premium. If you are not sure which version you are getting, ask the reseller as some are more upfront about this than others. Under Advanced Configuration, System, Device Info, you can verify the cameras firmware release. The next tab over, Time Settings is where you set the time zone and if you want it to sync up with a time server NTP. I always use a time server to make sure the cameras are in sync when I review video. Video settings is where you change the resolution, frame rate, bit rate. For those that dont understand bit rate, its basically how much do you want to compress the video. The lower the number means higher compression is used to achieve that goal, higher number means less compression. To me, 4. 09. 6 does a decent job, 6. I typically set most of my 3. MP cameras. Stream type is where you chose which stream you want to change settings for. Patch Kaspersky Anti Virus Pro here. For example, when viewing the camera remotely, I like to use the second stream to reduce bandwidth use. Where I spent a lot of time tweaking is in the Image menus. This is where you adjust the camera settings to get the best image quality possible for specific locations. The Image Adjustments is what has the most impact. You can see I turn Sharpness down a bit. The reason is that sharpening may make a prettier picture, but sharpening artifacts can reduce the ability to identify an object or suspect so I prefer to do sharpening after the fact in Photoshop or other tools. At night sharpening enhances noises so if you wish to reduce noise at night, consider reducing sharpening. Then next item in the Image menus is Exposure Settings. For testing I always set this to 13. Gain comes by default at 1. It reduced noise slightly but at the expense of image brightness. Backlight Settings in the Image menus is where you can chose between backlight compensation BLC or wide dynamic range WDR. BLC is used when your image is very dark because of backlighting, like the sun is making everything into a shadow. WDR works differently by brightening shadows and darkening overly bright areas to provide more balance. The downside to WDR is that at night, it may introduce more noise into your image. This camera actually does very well with shadows at night without WDR as youll see. One more menu I want to show you. Under Image Enhancement, I would recommend you set the noise reduction slider to 1. I did not notice any ill effects from doing so and did make a difference in noise reduction at night. To setup motion detect events to record to the micro. SD card or NAS, the Events menu option lets you chose the motion detect area as a series of squares. Can be separate squares or contiguous like I have it below. To record, you have to select the Trigger Channel check box at the bottom. I set sensitivity at 2. Setting it to zero is the default meaning it wont record. Setting it to 4. 0 was way to sensitive and got way to many false alerts. Adjust this to what works for each camera location. Next, go to the Storage menus and Record Schedule and select how much pre and post event video to record as well as make sure the recording schedule is all green like this. If not, click the Edit button and set 0. Then in the Storage Management tab, if you have an SD card installed in the camera take the dome cover off and its in the back of the camera near the bottom, you can select the card and click the Format button to format the card. In my case, you can see Im using a 3. GB card to test with and I have 7. I chose 7. 5. You can set how much of the card you want to use.