101AV 16CH Security Camera System Hybrid HD H.265/H.264 2in1 DVR/NVR, HD-TVI/CVI/AHD/IP, HDMI/VGA Video Out, Phone APPs for Home & Office, Work w/ 5MP Lite Analog & 8MP Lite IP Camera, No HDD(no PoE)

Great Product and Great Installation Experience. Bought this 16ch Security DVR box from Amazon to replace another brand I bought ~ 10 years ago. This is a no brand name (101 AV inc.) but so far its great. Within 10 minutes of taking it out of the box, and hooking up my 8 old cameras, it was working. I could see all cameras working and the pictures were so much more clear than before. I did not even have to read the manual to get it working. Good thing, the printing was very small. Not for old folks. The user interface is way better than my old system. I used the included mouse to log in to make some set up changes. A little confusion occurred when I changed the password. It asked me to do something with "GUID." I called tech support which was just a few miles from me in Silicon Valley. Great people. Very good English. Think they were Taiwanese or Chinese which is great. I've worked in those countries and I love the people there. Roger in tech support told me to ignore the GUID stuff. Very happy to do that. Then I set it up on my home network. Gave it the IP address of my old system. No problems. Set the system to record only when they detect motion. Alternative is to have full time recording. Then I went to my laptop, and typed in the IP address into a browser. But I got nothing. Roger at tech support said to only use Internet Explorer. Chrome and Firefox would not work due to security issues and probably not allowing the plug in to run. With IE running and the IP typed in where you type in URLs, it installed a plug in and I could see the 8 cameras working perfectly. Very simple. There is also a CD which contains software so you don't need to use IE. I may look at that someday. But it was not needed to get things working. Then I wanted to see the cameras on my iPhone. Could not do this with the old system. Took a few minutes to load the app called Guarding Vision. The manual tells you about that. Typed in a few things, pointed my iPhone at the model / serial label on the bottom of the box. Had to create another password. Then I could see my cameras on my iPhone. Since this all went so fast I thought I would explore the user interface. Actually it is very good. Its very well organized and easy to move around with the mouse. I looked at some recorded video and was able to see myself walking in front of the cameras a bit earlier. This was fairly easy and smooth. So this is a great product, and I think the company must be pretty good. I had looked at the Samsung branded box but there were complaints about installation and user interface and reliability. So I went with this box. Very happy so far.

I purchased this 16CH Security Camera System to replace a Swann DVR which died. Paramount necessity was to be able to plug-n-play my existing wired cameras. Just moved the BNC connectors to the 101 Audio Video DVR. Powered up and everything was working as expected. Later I did some reading and discovered that this system could send an email when a camera detected motion. I set this up for my front door camera, and now I get an email with pictures showing me what caused the motion. Now, Amazon, FedEx and UPS get their pictures taken when delivering. Very happy with this purchase and I highly recommend to anyone needing a good quality DVR. The price was surprisingly low when compared to others on the market. I only have one negative comment, and that is the noise level of the fan. I believe that this device was designed to be rack mounted in a computer room. The sound of the fan gives this away.

This hybrid started acting up at around a year after purchasing it, glitching and freezing up to the point where it was unresponsive and you had to power it down by pulling out the power cable's plug to reboot, since there is no power switch. After reboot it would function normally for about a day. Then it was to the point where rebooting several times a day. The hard drive was not included so I purchased a WD Purple 2 TB which developed bad sectors within 5 months to the point where the HDD would no longer function "HDD is abnormal" is the only warning you would get, and this was after it killed the HDD. Ended up replacing the hard drive 3 separate times with this unit, thinking that the hard drives failed by themselves, but after the third and last hard drive. I decided to part ways with this unit. Enough! I contacted product support asking for assistance and I did get them to respond. They wanted photographs of the item not working, but from the first email I never heard back from them. No support at all. Not sure why because their website says something totally different. So at this point I am left with a useless item that lasted barely over a year and have to now search for a usable DVR/NVR. Save yourself from the headache that I took from this product and do not purchase. You may thank me later.

As someone who has used 101AV products for many years, I have been extremely pleased with the quality of their DVR's, up until now. I have had 3 16 channel DVRs and 4 8 channel DVRs spread out between Texas, Missouri, and Virginia, and the only problems I have had was a hard drive controller failure in one of the 8 channel DVRs after a lightning strike. Definitely not the fault of the product. The fact that the integral hard drive controller was the only damage speaks volumes for the quality of the device. Unfortunately, this meant I had to replace the entire unit. This unit has an all new interface and uses all new CMS software. I have spent several days trying to figure out a way to get all of the systems to work together under a single CMS instance with absolutely no success. I get the fact that time moves forward, advances are made, etc., etc., etc. But the fact that the new software is not backwards compatible with their older equipment is unforgivable. Now I am stuck with having to try to find some 3rd party software that will work with all of my equipment and if there is none to be found, then I have to decide if I am going to set up a separate monitoring system for this single DVR, since the old software will not work with it, or if I am going to have to replace every other DVR with the new version so I can keep all the monitoring one a single CMS. I am very disappointed in you 101AV!! Sad to say, after many years of using your products, if I am forced to replace all of my equipment to keep everything under a single CMS instance, it will not be your products I purchase.