The Floureon CCTV kit with four cameras and control unit seems to offer exceptionally good value for money. Included with the kit is a control unit, four cameras with night vision, a set of cables with fitted sockets for each camera, a power splitter and two power adapters with uk plugs, one for the cameras and one for the control unit.

I’ve used a number of CCTV kits for commercial premises including both IP cameras and analogue BNC types like these and have always found that two things stand out, one is the quality of the cameras and the other is the software and what features it offers. I’m pleased to say that these cameras, although not full 1020p HD are very decent for the price and have impressive night vision capability, better in fact than some far more expensive cameras I have. The software is also very impressive and far better than I expected although with one or two minor niggles.

The control unit is impressively small and very quiet, although fitting a hard drive does increase the noise slightly. (depends on the drive I guess, but the old sky box drive I used for testing wasn’t silent). I don’t think you would want it in your bedroom, but in a garage or study in a corner should be fine. I did find that using rubber mounts on the drive improved things.

When you first setup the unit, its dead simple. First plug in a camera. The cables for the cameras are labelled telling you which end goes into the unit and which to the camera. You simply plug a red (power) and yellow (bnc video) into each camera, plug the other yellow end into a video input on the control unit and the other power end into the splitter which in turn is plugged into a power adapter. Plug the other power adapter into the control unit (both adapters are identical), plug in the supplied mouse and a network cable and HDMI and your away.

When the unit is first turned, you are asked to log in, the username is “admin” (prefilled) and a small message tells you the default password is NULL, I actually found I had to leave it blank. Once in a wizard appears asking for some basic setup information such as time zone (set to china by default) and network information. Oddly the device is not set to DHCP by default and will not pick up an address automatically, instead you need to enter the networking screen and change the settings from the default of 192.168.1.10 to whatever you require. Once past these screens the unit is basically up and running.

I had a play with some of the settings and found some useful features such as the ability to turn on motion detection and automatically record as well as send out alerts. This seemed to work ok for me most of the time, but I found the recording didn’t always occur when expected and for some reason I couldn’t get email to send, however I’m confident these are configuration issues and once I’m used to the system these will work perfectly.

Something I was very interested in was the Smartphone apps, sadly however my phone didn’t recognise the QR codes provided so I wasn’t able to download and test those. I’ll update this review once I’ve done that.

NB: For folks wanting to put a hard drive in the unit, it comes with two available SATA ports with a single set of power and data cables already in place. (both SATA)

To summarise, you would be very hard pressed to find anything similar for anywhere near this amount of money. The features, camera quality, and in particular the ease of use is exceptional for the price.

Five stars from me.