Indoors or outdoors
Outdoor cameras need a weather rating, and given how much of New Zealand sits within a few kilometres of the coast, salt tolerance matters more here than the specification sheet usually admits. Salt air corrodes unsealed housings, mounting brackets and screws, so a camera rated only for rain will not last on an exposed coastal wall. Indoor models can be smaller and cheaper because they do not need sealing. Check the rating rather than the description. Sealed housings last. Splash-resistant ones degrade far sooner.
Signal is the thing that catches people out. WiFi reaches far less far outdoors than indoors, especially through block walls or across a yard. If the camera is going more than about twenty metres from the router, test the signal at that spot first, or use a 4G camera instead, which ignores WiFi entirely.
Where the footage goes
Three options, and they cost different things. A card in the camera is free, works when the internet is down, and is gone if the camera is stolen. A local recorder keeps everything in the house on a hard drive, holds far more, and survives one camera being taken. Cloud storage survives the whole house being taken, and it is the one that carries a monthly fee.
Check what a camera does without a subscription before you buy it. Some record to a card and use the cloud only as a bonus. Others put live view behind a paid plan, which turns a one-off purchase into an ongoing bill. Neither is wrong, but they are not the same product.
Solar on this page too
A good part of this range runs on a solar panel rather than a plug, which is worth knowing because people assume solar means 4G. It does not. If the site has WiFi in range but no convenient socket, a solar WiFi camera is cheaper to run than a 4G one, because there is no SIM and no data to pay for.
Getting signal to where the camera goes
A WiFi camera is only as good as the WiFi reaching it, and the far corner of a section is usually where it does not. A router indoors loses a great deal through an exterior wall, and again through distance and wet foliage.
Before mounting anything, stand at the spot with a phone and look at the actual signal. If it is one bar, the camera will connect, drop, reconnect and fill your phone with offline notifications. The fixes, in order of cost, are moving the router, adding a mesh point or an outdoor access point, running an ethernet cable, or accepting that the site wants a 4G camera instead.
Night vision, and why colour at night is a separate feature
Standard infrared gives a black and white image and works in complete darkness. Colour night vision needs light, either a spotlight built into the camera or existing lighting, and gives you the one thing black and white cannot: what colour the car was, what colour the jacket was. For identification rather than detection, that difference matters more than resolution does.
Weatherproofing that survives a New Zealand winter
Outdoor cameras carry an IP rating: the second digit is water, and IP66 or better is what you want anywhere exposed. Below that, a camera sold as weather resistant is really splash resistant, and driven rain finds the seam eventually.
Mount under an eave where you can. It keeps direct rain off the lens, stops the housing baking in summer sun, and keeps spiders off the front glass, which is the single most common cause of false motion alerts at night.
Related
For sites with no power, see 4G security cameras. For a camera that pans and follows movement, look for pan-tilt-zoom models on this page.
Common questions
Does it record if the internet drops? Most keep recording to a memory card and sync once the connection returns.
Can several people view the same camera? Yes, on most models, by sharing access in the app.