Review on 📷 Swann 8 Channel 4 Camera Security System, Wired Surveillance 1080p Full HD DVR 1TB HDD, Indoor/Outdoor, Heat & Motion Detection + Night Vision, Google Assistant + Alexa Compatible, SWDVK-845804V by Marc Hawkins

Particularly unpopular. I bought this to replace a 10 year old system that died on mine and thought I was getting a decent deal for the price. That's for a reason, because I couldn't find anything good about it that I like. I first hooked up a DVR and camera for testing purposes and connected them to my 36 inch 1080p monitor that I used on my old system. The text wasn't legible so I just clicked a few buttons until I saw a blurry square that looked like dimensions and I clicked on it and it toggled from 720p to "1080p". The quality was still very pixelated and looked like garbage. , but I figured after I finish the update wizard I can check for a firmware update and maybe fix it. Once again this didn't happen, it looks like garbage on the big screen. The menus are pixelated, even pictures. I set my only camera to full screen and there were huge pixels everywhere, I couldn't even see the face of anyone standing 10 feet from the camera. So I installed the app on my phone and was surprised how well it works. The footage on my phone looks amazing, there is a little lag but the quality was excellent. exactly what I expected on my security monitor. So I hooked up other cameras using the app and I'm just not impressed. I've changed almost every setting to try and get a crisp picture on my monitor, but every setting just makes things more pixelated and impossible to see, so those jagged pixels are the best you can do when using HDMI connect to a monitor directly from a monitor. Apparently DVR. Then I found a DVR app for my computer so I could control the cameras the same way and the software was the same as my old DVR. So I already had a lot of knowledge about how it works. Once again the video quality looks great, it was a bit laggy too but I cranked up the sub-stream quality to see if the DVR is showing correctly on my monitor, after lowering that quality the streams are ok now When I use the remote playback function to view the footage, it's choppy, there's no continuous motion at all. How can a downloaded file be intermittent? Even if I changed the settings, I could not achieve smoothness. So all in all a pointless purchase. When I sit in my security room and look at the monitor I get low quality images, when I sit on my computer with the application open I get good quality. But if something happened and I needed a record, it would happen intermittently and you wouldn't be able to tell what's going on. Which, in my opinion, completely defies the purpose of the security system. I reached out to Swann directly to see what I could do to fix these issues hoping there might be a fix, but it's been two weeks and I still haven't received a response. I'll wrap up this junk and send it back and get something better!