This review first appeared in issue 356 of PC Pro.
TP-Link may be best known for its affordable business networking products, but it also has a strong presence in the video surveillance market. Its VIGI family offers a range of network video recorders (NVRs) and cameras, and in this review we look at its NVR1004-4P four-channel NVR and test it with TP-Link’s latest C540V outdoor PTZ IP camera.
Costing under £100, the NVR looks great value but you’ll need to add the extra cost of a SATA hard disk to store video recordings. At the rear are four network camera ports, each delivering PoE+ services, and it has a total power budget of 53W.
HDMI and VGA ports support local monitors, two old-school phono jacks are provided for audio in and out and a separate Fast Ethernet port facilitates NVR web management. Setup is easy; after fitting a 4TB Western Digital Red Pro hard disk in the NVR, we connected an HD monitor and followed the onscreen wizard.
To secure access, you choose an admin password and provide a recovery email address. You can also set a global username and password as well as a recovery email that are applied to VIGI cameras when they first come online.
The wizard finishes by displaying QR codes for TP-Link’s VIGI mobile apps. To use them, you create a TP-Link ID account and bind the NVR to it from its web console. We also loaded TP-Link’s Security Manager app on a Windows host and linked it to our ID account for remote NVR access, although this doesn’t provide event management.
To add the C540V camera, we connected it to a PoE port and waited ten seconds while the NVR discovered it. All security settings and firmware updates were applied for us, and the NVR assigned a base set of video parameters that included enabling the latest H.265+ codec.
This IP66-rated camera delivers great image quality. Along with good contrast and color balance, it has a sharp focus, handles bright sunlight well and its motorized pan and tilt functions cover a lot of ground. The IR LED provides good night illumination up to around 20 meters, its white LEDs are blindingly bright, and the powerful integral speaker will scare the living daylights out of intruders.
The NVR1004-4P can’t match Synology’s DVA appliances, which provide slick people counting, face recognition and crowd control features, but it does offer a good range of detection and recording features. For basic motion detection, you draw multiple polygonal shapes in the camera view where you want it applied, set object height and width filters, tweak the sensitivity and enable human and vehicle detection.
Smart events go further, and allow you to draw lines in the camera view to denote digital fences and choose one-way or two-way directions. Custom detection zones can be monitored for objects being removed or those that linger in them for a specific period, while entry and exit regions are used to keep an eye on specific areas such as building entrances.
Along with event recording, trigger actions can include pop-up warnings, sounding NVR and camera audio alarms and activating a camera’s security lights. Recordings can be viewed from the NVR’s local monitor or web console, the Security Manager and mobile app, with options to choose camera channels and scroll through their timelines to points of interest.
The NVR1004-4P supports ONVIF-compliant IP cameras and it discovered our D-Link models as soon as we connected them to the PoE ports. We customized the live view to show all camera feeds, but features are more limited as we could only apply basic motion detection events to them.
You’ll need to use TP-Link’s VIGI cameras to get the best from it, but the NVR1004-4P is a good choice for small businesses seeking affordable in-house video surveillance. It offers plenty of video analytics features, the C540V camera scores highly for image quality, and the components are offered at very competitive prices.
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