H.View 5MP PoE Security Camera with AI Face Detection

Knowing something moved is not the same as knowing who.

Something walks off the yard overnight. You pull the footage up next morning and there it is — a grey smear crossing the frame at two in the morning, too dark and too small to tell you a thing. You know you were done over. You cannot tell whether it was a stranger, a neighbour, or the bloke who drops your deliveries. So nothing happens. No report worth making, no conversation worth having, and you buy the gear again out of your own pocket.

That gap is what this camera is built to close. It runs at 5MP down a single network cable, and rather than alerting on every moth and every branch it looks for a person. When it finds one it puts a box around them, saves a snapshot of the face, switches the picture from black-and-white to colour and turns a spotlight on them — which is usually the end of the visit. The alert lands on your phone while it is happening, not the next morning.

It is a wired camera. One Ethernet run carries the power and the picture, so there is no Wi-Fi to drop out and no battery to go flat. That also means you need a PoE switch or recorder at the other end, and it will not record anything on its own.

What It Does

• Looks for people: the detection is set on a human shape rather than anything that moves, so a branch in the wind or a moth on the lens is meant to be ignored.
• Lights them up: when a person is detected the white spotlight comes on. That gives you a colour picture and makes it very clear to whoever is standing there that the camera saw them.
• Grabs the face: face detection puts a box on a face in frame and saves a snapshot of it alongside the recording.
• Three night modes: infrared for a black-and-white picture with no visible light, full-time colour with the spotlight always on, or smart — dark and quiet until somebody turns up.
• Tells you while it happens: a push notification through the XMEye app, an emailed still, or an FTP upload, set up whichever way suits you.
• Draws its own boundaries: you set the zones it watches, a line nobody should cross or an area nobody should stand in, and you set the sensitivity.
• One cable does the lot: Power over Ethernet carries power, video and audio down a single run.

Key Features

• 5MP sensor: five megapixel CMOS, recording in H.264 or H.265.
• 107 mm across: the housing measures 107 mm in diameter and stands 91 mm off the surface, taken from the supplier dimension drawing.
• Integrated spotlight and infrared: both sit in one LED cluster above the lens, so there is nothing extra to mount or wire.
• 3.6 mm lens: a supplier-stated 90 degree field of view. Wide enough for a driveway, a shed door or a yard — it is not a long lens.
• Built-in microphone: it records sound as well as picture. One-way only, so there is no speaker in it.
• IP66 housing: metal and ABS, rated by the supplier for dust and heavy rain.
• Powered two ways: an IEEE 802.3af or 802.3at PoE switch or recorder, or a 12V supply on the pigtail.
• H.265 compression: the supplier states it uses up to 50% less bandwidth than H.264 for the same footage.
• One, two or four: sold as a single camera or as a two or four camera pack, and the four works out cheapest per camera.

Limits

• Detection, not recognition: it finds a face in the frame and saves a picture of it. It does not know whose face it is, it does not match it against a list of people, and it cannot give you a name. Nothing on this page should be read as face recognition.
• False triggers still happen: the supplier artwork claims it avoids 99.5% of false alarms and lists pets, insects, shadows and changing light as things it filters out. That is the supplier figure, we have not tested it, and 99.5% is not zero. Rain on the lens, a spider building across it overnight and headlights swinging over a wall will all still set something off.
• Colour at night means a light is on: in infrared mode the picture is black and white. The colour picture comes from the spotlight, so you cannot have a dark, discreet camera and a colour image at the same time.
• The 25 metre figure is infrared: the supplier states an infrared range of 3 to 25 metres. It states no distance at all for the spotlight, so we are not going to print one.
• IP66 is a weather rating, not a waterproof one: it is built for dust, heavy rain and a hose-down. Do not submerge it, do not mount it anywhere it can sit underwater, and keep a close-range pressure washer off it.
• It hears, it does not speak: one-way audio. There is no speaker, so no talking to anyone through it and no siren out of it.
• Digital zoom is a crop: 8x digital zoom enlarges what the sensor already captured. It does not reach any further than the lens does.
• It will not record on its own: the supplier lists no onboard storage, and no memory card slot appears on any of its diagrams. Footage goes to a PoE network video recorder, or to a PC running the recording software.
• The power supply is not in the box: the supplier own diagram says so, in red. If you are not powering it over Ethernet you supply the 12V adapter yourself.
• We make no claim about what the footage proves: we are not saying it will satisfy a court, an insurer, a police report or any workplace surveillance requirement. We do not know, and it is not ours to say.
• Recording faces carries legal weight in Australia: privacy and surveillance-device law varies by state, and it is worth reading before you point one of these at a footpath, a neighbour block or your own staff. We are not going to advise you on it.

Q & A

Does it actually recognise who somebody is?

No. It detects that a face is in the frame and saves a snapshot of it next to the recording. There is no database, no matching and no names in it. If you need to know who somebody is, this gives you a clear picture to look at — you still do the recognising.

Will it stop alerting every time the wind blows?

That is what the person detection is there for, and the supplier figure is 99.5% of false alarms avoided. We have not tested that. What we can tell you is that you draw the zones it watches and turn the sensitivity up or down yourself, which is usually what settles a camera that cries wolf. Point one at a busy road and it will still find plenty of real people to alert on.

What else do I need to buy?

A PoE switch or PoE recorder that supports IEEE 802.3af or 802.3at, and a network cable to reach it. If you are not using PoE, a 12V power supply — which is not included — and a cable back to your router. And somewhere for the footage to live: a network video recorder, or a PC running the recording software.

Can I run one on its own, without a recorder?

For live viewing, yes. You set the camera IP address with the supplier Windows software, then pair the phone app to it using the camera cloud ID or its QR code. The supplier publishes a two-page walkthrough for exactly that: H.View standalone camera setup guide (PDF, hosted on Google Drive). Recording is a separate job — live view on a phone does not store anything.

How well does it see in the dark?

Three ways, and you pick. Infrared gives a black-and-white picture with no visible light, out to a supplier-stated 3 to 25 metres. Full-time colour keeps the spotlight running all night. Smart mode sits in infrared until it detects a person, then the spotlight comes on and the picture goes colour. The supplier does not state how far the spotlight throws, so neither do we.

How long does delivery take?

Ten to fourteen days from the day you order, and we would allow up to three weeks. Delivery is free to Australia and New Zealand.

Specs