Back in January, I had a HikVision bullet camera fail on me. It’s a shame, you buy these devices and after years of use outdoor in the elements they up and fail. For many years we had been using HikVision cameras with the Milestone application, while the cameras were cheap Milestone is not a cheap application… and I hate it!
So when I had a chance to replace a camera, like always I looked into what savings options could be had. So I decided I had a perfect time to test Ubiquiti’s G4 Pro… though just putting one in wasn’t something I wanted. I wanted to see the difference between the G3 and G4.
Of course the first thing I knew was that with going to Ubiquiti I couldn’t use Milestone anymore, though that wasn’t an issue. For my indoor cameras I had already gone to a using UniFi cameras inside where the 1080p resolution was more than enough.
Currently, we are still using UniFi Video, this isn’t because of some hatred of UniFi Protect. At home, I run UniFi Protect on my Cloud Key Gen 2 and love it! Though for work I don’t want the footage on a single drive with no redundancy. Though the UNVR4 they have in Early Access does look promising and once released I hope will become my new NVR platform… I hope to do a review on it as soon as they are out!
So back to the camera I had to replace, its location meant I had a range of nature, road, dark and light spaces. It was almost a perfect location to test a camera. And thankfully I had a G3 Pro sitting on my desk at home that wasn’t doing much… who doesn’t have spare gear just lying around?
As you can see the image is fine, however it isn’t very sharp. And the colours aren’t great.
And now the G4 Pro, one thing that did change is the image was moved slightly to the right. Which meant that the dark area couldn’t be as covered as much, but overall I am a fan of the increase. Sharper image, better colours.
Plus the G4 Pro with its 4K resolution allows me to zoom in much further than I could on the G3. For example, you can see in the first G3 sample that there are some people far back, zooming in on them with a G3 is pointless, each person is around 5 pixels. However on the G4, it isn’t perfect, but it is much better.
I’m not going to lie… when talking to my office each day, I do like seeing the halo of blue around the camera and knowing it is on.
So… conclusion?
The G4 is a great camera, and for me I am happy with the price since I like the simple UniFi interfaces and the fact that anyone can use them. Those who are allowed to review footage at work do find the Ubiquiti cameras muck easier to use.
Now I am not a ‘quick pull everything out and replace it’ type of person. However, I will be replacing my HikVision cameras with Ubiquiti ones as and when they die. And with the UNVR4 hopefully coming soon I will be getting one for home and hopefully at work as well for a better redundancy style security system!
To help fund this blog, I have decided to start linking to Amazon Affiliated Links to the products I used.
Ubiquiti G3 Pro
https://amzn.to/2zXiT2f
Ubiquiti G4 Pro
https://amzn.to/2LPTZ7n
June 26, 2020 at 6:24 pm
Great review bro.
I was about making a purchase decision. I have a multi-site multi-location CCTV project coming up. I was already considering a hikvision/milestone or axis/milestone setup.
I’m really concerned about being able to get all the footage to the central control room and under the same software instance for easy monitoring and archiving.
Do you think the solution from ubiquiti will be better?
June 26, 2020 at 9:17 pm
I haven’t tried to do layer 3 adoption with Unifi Cameras… that would be cool though.
I suggest posting that on the UniFi Community Forum: https://community.ui.com/tags/unifi-protect
They are lots of really intelligence guru’s and the awesome team at Ubiquiti there who will be able to answer that for you.