Side by Side Comparison of: Funlux vs Masione vs Seagate vs Alytimes vs Amazon

We've had these cameras for nearly 2 years now and I'm just now writing a review. They have been great for us. We had some trespassing from a road that ran about an acre behind our house and people kept doing it after being asked to stop. Called the police, showed them the videos, they knew the people in the neighborhood, told them to stop, after they didn't and came to the property again, they got a trespassing charge. They aren't really great with night vision unless there is a little light such as a street lamp or something but otherwise great for the money!

The DVR and cameras are of typical quality for home-use products in its price range and the camera/dvr package is a good value. What makes this product stand out are the remote viewing apps: Zsight (mobile) and meshare (web browser) - which are easy to configure, connect and share with friends (I use the unit as a "chicken cam" to check in on the girls while away.)

After 8 months continuous use, the DVR inexplicably died. I contacted zmodo support via online chat and was directed to submit their RMA request form for return and repair. The online form was simple enough to complete and I received email confirmation after I submitted it. A few days later I received my RMA authorization along with directions on where to mail the defective unit. I returned the unit using USPS and received email confirmation when zmodo received the unit for evaluation. Later that same day I received additional status updates confirming the defect and notifying me that a replacement unit was sent. The replacement unit arrived at my door a few days later. I appreciated zmodo's communication and found it to be an overall positive support experience.

I remember reading product reviews before I originally purchased the unit - many of which complained of poor/inaccessible support and broken web links. I can attest that as of mid 2016, those complaints are no longer relevant. Zmodo (the manufacturer behind the Funlux brand) has their customer service / repair act together.

Hope this helps others with their purchase decision.

Received the product so fast and in very good package. Now i have 5 months using the cameras and everything it's working ok.

*Resolution it's decent for the prize, as you can see in attached files you can't read a car plate outside the house but it's ok to distinguish if is someone out there
*Instalation it's so intuitive
*Included cord it's enough for a standard instalation
*For android smartphones i recommend MeShare app (screenchot attached), you can use MeShare website to connect remotely from a PC
*You can connect localy from a PC, but only from internet explorer (not even MS Edge), from here you can see live streaming or playback recorded videos if you installed an HDD.
*Bougth a 1TB HDD and the instalation was very easy and simple.

I needed a little help with setting up the IP address, figure out the ports, and some other technical stuff, but I'm lucky enough to have a close friend who knows his way around that stuff. I got very close, but needed just a little expertise help. Now it works great! From work or my cell phone I watch my kids get home from school, check on the dog, etc. Last night, I sat in my chair and watched as a spider crawled onto one of the cameras. It was amazing! I saw it eat a few things, weave a little web I think, and all this up close and live, like a magnifying glass!
I've seen some negative reviews, but I'd bet most of those were because there is some technical stuff while setting up. It came with 4 cameras, and I'm looking into buying more... hopefully I can find a wireless one that I can move to various locations and not worry about drilling holes in my walls for the wiring.
The night vision works pretty well, not great, but pretty well. I've had to adjust the positioning so the IR doesn't reflect off of up close things like branches or whatever, then it works reasonably.
Realize that you do have to purchase a harddrive if you want to be able to review video, but it does work as a monitoring system as is.
I found a refurbished 1TB harddrive locally for $30, and am now in business for recorded surveillance.

Love the night vision , Smart reviews , don't have to review 24hrs just olny highlighted or any movement , even little tiny fruit fly or dust night vision picks them up so clear. Works great but can be hack n edit by with or without wi-fi by hackers.

My enterprising son decided to build his own gaming computer. He went online, found all the parts he needed and we proceeded to order them. This product has held up to daily game playing and was easy to install for a 12 year old.

This HDD is great! I've used it to hold games, my OS, and other information over the years. No mechanical failures to note and it still passes the S.M.A.R.T. test despite countless reading and writing on the platter. Great product even though it's the "old model"

I bought one of these Seagate 1TB drives years ago for my XP computer. Over the years, as I've upgraded to Windows 7, Windows 10 and Ubuntu (Linux), I have installed the operating systems on a new Seagate 1TB drive each time. Since some of the older software will not work on the new operating systems, I have a 51/4" hot swap drive bay for the 31/2" hard drives. This provides me the option of running the different operating systems on the same PC. I could have upgraded to a newer version of the Seagate drive, but this model has been extremely reliable. It suites my purposes, and as the old adage goes ..., "If it ain't broke don't fix it".

Easy to install right out of the box. Plug and Play, was recognized right away. haven't had any problems in the time I've had this drive in operation. Very pleased so far.Seagate was the going drive even in the early 1980's. Long before Western Digital came along. I prefer Seagate over WD because of their long years of experience with Hard Drives and reliability. I have had too many WD drive fail on me. Fast Writes & Reads (176mb/184mb)- 2X1TB Raid 0 Performance (340mb/380mb)- Affordable- Reliable BrandOther Thoughts: Very impressed with the performance of this drives. It's amazing how much hard drives have improved over the years.I ran this on Raid 0 on a Mac Pro with a SATA II Interface and was surprised at the read and write performance.Now obviously an SSD is still going to be faster in many respects, but I honesty, I'm super happy I chose this over an SSD simply because of the storage space.I've owned an SSD, just so everyone knows. So I'm aware of the amazing speeds, but for those who are price conscious and need more storage this is a great alternative.Seagate 1TB Desktop HDD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST1000DM003)

It's a 1TB hard drive. Not much more to say.It's fast and reliable so far - grabbed 2 of these for my video rendering server and they're holding up quite well.Quiet and thin, since they're only 1TB.Great value for the price.

Seagate has been my goto hard drive choice for 20+ years. I've never had a failure, though it could happen tomorrow so I do back up regularly. But my backup is to external hard drives which are themselves Seagate. It is not that I haven't used other brands; especially Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi. The only other brand with which I've never had a failure is the Hitachi.I should add that Seagate bought Maxtor some years ago, but my failure drives were prior to that. I did have a failed WD drive just a couple months ago. That computer had four drives and all had operated flawlessly for four years. This Seagate is the replacement for that one (Though I put them all in a new, much faster computer.)

test all cables before installation, came with 1 bad cable, found that out after installation. had to remove & reinstall another set, wasted about 1 hour.

great and good experience. fine. The product arrived on time and was well packaged. My wife has been baking some wonderful loaves of artisan-type rye, white and whole wheat breads. They are very crusty, and we had experienced some difficulty finding a product that could handle the crust. This product worked extremely well, cutting through the crust with ease. We are very pleased with our recent purchase. this price is valuable. SINDY very love it ,

Very clear picture during the day. The night vision works as long as there are objects in front of the camera like a fence, its made for closer up. It doesn't come with the hard drive to record, so if you are buying it wanting to record you need to buy an internal hard drive. It plugs right in under the cover. I haven't hooked it up to my internet yet to get it on my phone. Over all does what I want it to.

Very straightforward installation and operation. I do wish the remote software was better, so one star lost there, but it does the job.
Unfortunately, we got these because of pictures moving on a shelf. I was sure we would catch the ghost. Of course, since we have 4 cameras pointed at them they haven't moved since.
Also, want to point out that this doesn't include a hard drive. I happened to have a spare laying around, but if you don't you'll need to order one.

I can see what's happening around my daughter's house, day or night. It was not easy to install or set up the online monitoring, but it was worth it.

Works exceptionally well! If I had realized that the SATA 3 was backwards compatible with SATA 2 controllers I would have done that instead. That aside, 1 terabyte drive for the money I spent? Good deal here. if you need a upgrade in storage on your computers and this is compatible.. I would strongly suggest it

After receiving the drive, I installed it in a refurbished computer, and installed Fedora 25 in UEFI mode with no problems. Then I checked the drive health with SMART. The surface scan found no errors, and most SMART indicators showed "new" levels. However, attribute 195 shows 4% 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 072 069 006 Pre-fail Always - 17959705 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 22195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 004 004 000 Old_age Always - 17959705I'm not sure if this a bug, or a defective drive, but one would think that SMART would be checked automatically on the way out the factory door.

I don't see how everyone is saying this drive has crashed on them in such catastrophic ways. Since I've owned this drive, it's done nothing but work as described. Of course being a standard magnetic HDD, it's not lightning fast by any means, but that's what Solid State Drives are for. Now, I haven't used this drive for RAID or any other super intensive process, but It is used as my default data drive. I'm constantly writing, reading, and removing data from it. For the price, i'd say it's worth it and it can hold it's own against other manufacturers. You're not going to find an out of this work HDD for less, and this will more than get you by, unless as previously mentioned, your doing very intensive things with it.

I bought this at the end of last year after having my Western Digital Blue 500GB HDD since 2012, and was in need of a new drive, out of the box the Seagate 1TB was only half the thickness of the WD 500GB and was a bit lighter, not surprising considering the advances seagate has made over the years, drive went in fine. The drive works well and has been a great upgrade for my PC, though one thing that bothers me is it's "head parking" feature that will park the read/write head when nothing is being written to the disk, at times it gives the impression that the HDD is dying it's quite a useless feature in my opinion seeing as it actually will shorten the life of the drive just to save pennies from your power bill. All in all though it's a great drive.

As hard drives grow larger and larger, the one fear I always have is reliability. It was one thing to lose a few hundred gigabytes of information, but something entirely different when you lose a terabyte of photos, movies, games, and other information important to your spouse (hint, hint). I am happy to report that Seagate makes a quality product that has not had any issues since first purchased and installed in our system. Of course, this does not alleviate my need to backup my data on an external system (bigger hint), but I am not concerned that my day-to-day operations will be lost because of faulty technology.A few years back, the hard drive industry was in a race for speed (reported in rotations per minute - RPMs) and size (reported in bytes - MB, GB, TB, etc). While this led to some amazing advertising claims, we really never saw the type of increases that have come recently. Since the first SSD (solid-state drive) was introduced, manufacturers have finally divided their focus - to our benefit. Higher capacities (which do not require amazing speed to read/write) are becoming cheaper and cheaper to acquire in HDDs - while faster loads of the operating system (O/S) and software are being offered by SSDs. Unless your computer is space limited, it is advisable to have both - some things are not better when mixed together.Overall, if you're looking for an affordable high capacity hard drive, then Seagate fits the bill. It is outfitted with a 6Gb/s connector (which, if supported by your motherboard, is adequate for data transfer) and 64MB of on-drive cache - allowing the drive to better handle data transfers, as it spins and finds the data to feed to the system. I have a large collection of movies, games, and photos and still have plenty of room on this drive. I keep my O/S and other software on my SSD - so if/when I decide to finally upgrade from 1TB to the next, bigger drive - I can simply copy the data from this one to the new one - without any other issues. But always remember - as noted before - make off-machine backups of your important data.

A mirrored 1T drive in my NAS was failing and I needed a replacement. This worked perfectly, no installation issues and went RAID the first attempt. Would recommend as a replacement in a mirrored system. Does not come cluttered with somebody's idea of an idiot proof media storage device. Has been running 4 months with no errors and excellent system health. Would recommend at 5 stars but it was a replacement for a 3 year old Seagate drive that failed!

Cameras are not very clear after a few months. Alerts do not capture picture as before. It used to work perfect from my cell phone app, now it will not work on my cell phone unless hooked up to WiFi, says timed out.

System works great had no issues setting it up on a 2TB harddrive... Only complaint is the app sucks.. 3/4 of the time it doesn't work, will only bring up half of the cameras and now it wont let me view notifications. Would have given it a 5 star if the app was better.

Honest review:
The good...it is reasonably clear in the daytime. It is standard definition, in an H.264 compressed format, so it could be better, but it will do fine for my purposes during the day. All the cables were good (unusual, considering how cheaply most of them are made), and all the cameras function. Hard drive install was a snap. It came packed well, and seems to be decent quality.

The bad...the night vision is HORRIBLE. I can barely make out my two vehicles at night, all images have a large "ring" around them, that I can only assume is caused by the IR emitters themselves. The only time the night vision functions well is if there is a light on outside, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having night vision, now, doesn't it?

Of course, resolution takes a nose dive in the dark, so unless you have elephants roaming around in your yard, you are unlikely to be able to identify what is caught on camera.

I have installed many, many home surveillance camera systems, and this one is just...O.K. You get what you pay for.

I bought this to keep an eye on my property down in Mexico. The DVR part seems okay. It took me a little bit to figure out how everything worked but I eventually got the hang of it. The images are okay. You're not going to ID the guy but you will know that someone was there.

My hardship came with trying to set up the motion detection. I would change the sensitivity from high to low and after a while it would be back on high again. I never could figure out what caused this to keep resetting. Also even when the sensitivity was on low, it was recording motion when absolutely nothing was changing. I had one camera aimed at a brick wall in the middle of the night. It would email me a snap shot of nothing but a brick wall. If a bug had flown by, low sensitivity should have ignored that. I was getting emails day and night constantly even though sensitivity was on low and I had reduced the area that was detected to one little block out of the ten by ten block that it monitors for each image. I eventually shut off the motion detection and email as that feature seems useless.

If you have it hooked up in your house and can just let it record constantly then it is a good cheap option.

Easy hook up and connect to your network for remote viewing. Qr - code let you download the z - sight app that can only view from phone in the same network. .....no acces from the Internet. To access from the Internet you need other software like meye. Camera's in daylight are pretty sharp. At night the views are blurry and dark. When watching a site that is extra illuminated it will give you better results

It works but it's SOOOO loud. Whenever I play a game I always hear a little sound coming from it. I know it's not damaged because it's been doing it since the beginning and I've run a few tests but still, it's pretty annoying.

Circumstances prevented me from using the drive very much before it was broken. The plastic guard around the connection points broke, leaving exposed pins and no real way of ensuring a secure connection when plugging in a SATA cable. This isn't something that I can have fixed, so I had to discard the drive. I wish the plastic had been a little stronger on mine, but at the end of the day, it's my fault for breaking it. $60 wasted.

Purchased 3 for recent system upgrade that turned in to a "while your at it, might as well" complete new system build.2 drives used as a mirrored system drive and 1 drive as a backup cold spare.After about 2 weeks I started seeing some random system stability issues that quickly progressed.1 drive failed in a little less then 3 weeks of up time.Sending the dead drive back to Seaget for warranty replacement.No data lose! thanks to the RAID implementation on an MSI z95 PC Mate m/b and Intel rapid storage tech software.Recovery was painless it took about 2 hours to rebuild the 0.9 1TB volume with about 180B used. A lot less time and effort if I'd had to rebuild the system volume from scratch.I hadn't enabled "hot plug" in the m/b bios so I had to power down to swap drives.All important files and data are stored on a Qnap NAS. iSCSI volumes are awesome!

Perfect hard drive! Quiet, fast, and well made. It's also thinner than the average 3.5" HDD, which is pretty neat.Only issue, I am one of the few unlucky buyers to receive a defective drive. It keeps randomly powering down and spinning back up in the middle of doing something. And after a few days of that, my pc has gone completely corrupted and no longer useable. Luckily it was bought from amazon so I get a great return service. I will buy another one exactly the same, I trust I just got a rare bad one, which will happen sometimes. Nothing in the world is 100% perfect!

This drive was nice while it lasted. However, it died after about 40 days of intermittent use on my desktop PC.Everything was fine and then one day, I heard this horrible clanking noise.It sounded so bad I had a hard time accepting that it was coming from my PC, I thought it was something outside.I then started getting I/O errors and realized my worst fear: my new HD was toast.I put it in the freezer a few times since that is supposed to help with spindle issues (long enough to recover some data anyways) and managed to recover most of my data to another drive.I am currently in the process of RMAing the drive to Seagate (since it is just outside of Amazon's replacement window).However, I'm probably done with Seagate. I still have the box from my last Seagate that failed.If you look at HD reliability studies, you'll find Seagate is generally the worst.

Installed the Barracuda ST1000DM003 drive bought from Amazon into a Dell Studio XPS PC a couple of days ago. The drive works fine but there is excessive vibrations from the drive case. These vibrations were tranfered to the PC case via the mounting cage. The vibrations can be felt by touching the PC case. Not only it creates a low frequency rumble but also the vibrations are coupled to the desk and can be felt on my Logitech wireless mouse. Move the PC onto the floor, the low frequency rumble can still be heard but at least the tingling vibrations on the desk and mouse are gone. The original older ST32000641AS in the PC does not have this vibrational problem. No reply from Seagate tech support as yet if I had received a defective unit.There is a point of merit for its power management. If the drive is not accessed for sometime, it appears to go into an idle mood and the PC is quiet even the processor, drive C, and graphics card are in used.Received a reply from Seagate Tech Support, they did not address the vibration and noise problem but instead they claimed they have no power management on their drives. Their technical support competence is disappointing!

I cancelled this order

I absolutely loved this entire set up for....about 9 months until it quit recording, most likely because every minute or so it blanks out and resets. So now the whole thing is about useless. The cameras do seem to be decent quality

this product is ok but.....too many cords, I should've gotten the wireless one however the cameras do pick up a lot and the night vision is great. I had the worst trouble linking it to my phone and setting it up to record, infact I never got it connected so Im not really benefitting from it..the DVR doesnt record, its corrupted. Also one of the cameras detached from the base really easily and now loose cord is hanging from it, this is a little frustrating.

Spend the extra money and get a wireless. When it got here and I looked at the amount of work to install this and trying to figure out how to hide the cords in addition to the negative feedback on here I chose to return it for a full refund. With all of that said if you are looking for a low cost solution this might be for. I didn't want to risk all of the work to install it only to have to tear it back out if it failed like other commenters have complained about.

I thought we were getting a good deal and it would be nice to have the extra security. I'm thinking we wasted time and money. When we downloaded the app we quickly realized we can only watch the cameras from our Wi-Fi. I don't see a point in them if I can't use them while we're away. Honestly why would I want to watch the cameras when I'm at home? It would be nice to log on and watch them from another location... Get a better App.

After almost two years, the hard drive is starting to fail. Sometimes, it doesn't show up visible in BIOS, sometimes the PC goes to BSOD and restarts without warning. I can't recommend this when there are other hard drives out there that are less prone to early failure and will last you 4-5 years at the same price point.

I used to love Seagate products, but seems lately they've lost some of their mojo. I will buy brands other than Seagate in the future. Why, you ask? Well I've purchased 4 Seagate 1 TB drives in the past year, and 3 of them have gone bad on me. Don't have the technical skills to tell you exactly what went bad, but I can tell you they went bad, and even though I do keep good backups, I still lost some valuable data. That never makes me a happy camper. I expect hard drives to go bad, that's why I keep backups, just not that many that quickly.

The hard drives that I bought have a faulty chip that does overheat, and that lead to three of my four drives failing to run after two months. One of the drives chips even burned out. I have not used one drive and I can use the other two drives I used, but only on a cooling pad for a notebook computer. I have been in contact with Seagate about this matter. They did not admit to me any problem with the drives. I had one Seagate drive fail on me before. I got a a new controller board for it, and it has been working great for a long time now. I only hope that If I do the same for the one that burned out, and get a controller board that will not have that overheating problem in the chips that the drives I have used have all had.

Bought two of them 3 years ago at NewEggs, put them into ZFS mirror and ran 24x7 (home desktop PC) and they "lived happily ever after and died at the same day" (so lasted for almost 2 years).Next time I bought them here in Aug 2014 (DOM: 06/2014), put into same ZFS mirror 24x7 mode - first one is dead already (so lasted for slightly more than 1 year).I'm very disappointed with a quality and will never recommend Seagate production to anyone, it's a piece of a Chinese crap.Switching to SSD from now.

Bought two of these for use in a RAID 1 (mirror) configuration. One had CC43 firmware the other CC49. After two days of normal operation the CC49 drive showed as failed. Since the system was RAID 1 it continued to function although "degraded." I replaced the "failed" drive with a WD 1TB, the system rebuilt automatically and it has been normal for more than a month. Curiously the "failed" CC49 drive seemed OK as a standalone. Seagate Tech Support said that they do not support drives set up in RAID. Problems with Seagate drives in RAID have been reported elsewhere. Amazon made a full refund when I returned the CC49 drive.

I got a 1 TB drive from Amazon.I'm not sure if I happened to receive a defective unit. When I first installed it, the drive worked well. Then, after about 550 power-on hours (according to the SMART reporting) this drive began to not be recognized consistently on boot ups. Even after booting up, the drive would suddenly stop being recognized and would simply disappear. If I booted up from this drive, the computer would often lock up.A full erase with seatools did not help. And in Seatools (I used the DOS bootable version) it passes the tests! It takes a little while with the computer on to make it drop out.I wondered if the drive was getting too hot, but the other four drives in my case have no issues. I'm hoping that the replacement drive will work better.

This system worked ok for a couple of months and then totally crapped out on me. It is nice that it contained 4 camreas, and they are small enough to be hidden so you can be stealth like with it. Strangely, sometimes they were overly sensitive and taped the changes in sunlight, and other times they didn't pick up on movement at all and didn't tape it. There were times when I was physically in the area and I should have been filmed, but the cameras didn't pick up on me. It became less imperative for me to perform surveillance about the time that the system crapped out, so I didn't pursue repair. It wasn't that horribly expensive, but I can't necessarily say that it was worth the money either. I would think that if surveillance is really important, you should spend more money and purchase a better system.

I would not recommend this product. On the app I always receive a message that "Internet Speed is Too Slow". I paid to upgrade my wifi speed but still received the same message. On my laptop I received a message " Cameras Offline" although they are not. I am not able to review remotely and I have wasted money on this product.

In reading the description before purchase, this item said it was "Wireless" - I interpreted that to mean it had no wires.
THe set hooks to your computer wirelessly, but NEEDS WIRES between the unit and the cameras.
May work well, but we left it in the box to return it. Company was prompt to send return labels, but we have to pay return shipping.
They need to write a new description that states it requires the wires between the base unit and the cameras.
We were not wanting to drill holes in the walls to reach the porch or see wires inside the house either.
Back to the drawing board.
Company did not recommend a suitable product for exchange, so assuming they do not have one.

Piece of s*** by the time you finish with the installation you'll end spending $250 with hdmi and hard drive and also the app for remote viewing is not working in other words this system is garbage... can't get a good tech support nothing is good about this item do yourself a favor and buy a samsung for $250 and all you have to do is plug and play...

Updated a second time.
The FunLux system died after just 4 months. I was finally able to request an RMA via zmodo.com/rma
I did receive a replacement DVR after returning the defective unit and it is working (fingers crossed).

The support at zmodo.com seems be going downhill however. While I was able to submit an RMA request, the web page to check on an RMA request has been broken for weeks. I did use the Live Chat feature at least one time, but that feature is now broken (error 404).

I tried calling their US toll free number by a recorded message stated that "Zmodo support has moved" and to "go to zmodo.com"

So, the net is - my DVR broke after four weeks. I was able to successfully have it replaced via zmodo.com, but based on the current inability to contact support, I would not purchase another Funlux or zmodo unit.

One of the big problems trying to decide on an inexpensive camera system is trying to decipher the differences between the various systems available. Documentation is weak or non-existent and the manufacturer's web sites are confusing or apply to systems other than the one you bought.

I just found documentation here [...]

This Funlux system is no different. When you open the box there is only a sheet of paper that directs you to zmodo.com for instructions. One of the big problems with zmodo.com is that the site does not refer to specific systems like the Funlux, but instead has generic instructions for systems that are apparently sold under multiple brands. I "think" my unit is similar to a ZMD-DD-SBN8 (but does not have the external controls).

You can wander around there and pick up bits and pieces of information and if you are diligent, you can get it up and running, as I did. Just do not expect a very polished experience.

Now on to the unit itself. I received four cameras and the DVR unit with all power supplies, cables, etc. included. So no issues there.
I first set up the unit with the cameras on a bench to make sure it all worked before I started dragging cables through the attic.
I plugged in the power supplies for the DVR and the cameras, connected the DVR to my home network via an Ethernet cable (no wifi support on this unit), connected the DVR to a VGA monitor and powered it up.

The unit itself has no real controls on it - there are connections for the camera and a USB mouse port but no other controls on the front of the unit (unlike some of the other Zmodo systems that have a remote control and front panel controls. The monitor attached to the DVR only seems to display the cameras views. After I got it all set up I found that there are administrative controls on the screen. You have to double click the mouse to bring up the menu.

Since this unit did not include a hard drive, I installed a 2TB hard drive into it. This was the only function that I used the mouse for - to confirm formatting the hard drive. After the hard drive was formatted. I buttoned up the case with the included screws and rebooted the DVR.

My home network assigned a TCP/IP address to the DVR when it came online. I used the administrative controls on my router to identify the IP address that was assigned to the router. I don't know how you would do this without looking at the router, but maybe there is a screen I missed on the VGA monitor.

I then pointed Internet Explorer at the TCP/IP address of the DVR and logged it with the default user and password (admin/111111).
You must use Internet Explorer to access the DVR. Chrome, FireFox, or Safari do not work. You also have to install some browser code (there is a button labeled "OCX Download" on the DVR login prompt)
If you try to use another type browser or you do not have the OCX code installed, your browser will only display a blank blue screen.

Once I was logged in as admin, my first task was to change the default password. There are tens of thousands of camera systems that anybody can view because nobody changed the passwords of their systems. Do not be one of these people.

Once the DVR and cameras were verified as working, I installed the cameras and DVR in their permanent location. I mounted the DVR in a closet without a display because I intend to use the web browser or iPhone app to access. The picture quality from the cameras is acceptable. The cameras make an audible "click" when switching from color to night vision modes.
Speaking of the app, I installed the zsight app from the app store and was able to connect to the DVR on my local network by specifying the TCP/IP address. Once I set up a user and password on the app to log in, I was able to view the cameras remotely. I did not have to make any changes to my router permissions.
The IPhone app is a little flakey - it occasionally has a "Low memory" error and sometimes says "Internet connection speed too slow". Restarting the app usually address the problem. By the way - I tried installing zsight on my Android tablet, but it got a message that it wasn't compatible with my tablet (no other info). I tried the zviewer app from the Google Play store but I cannot get it to work.

Update - I was able to view the cameras remotely on my desktop with Internet Explorer by forwarding TCP/IP Ports 8000 and 80 - reference this guide (which doesn't provide ports for the Funlux) [...]

Summary
- Inexpensive unit with very little documentation
- The DVR has no real controls other than power switch but does have administrative interface
- Internet Explorer must be used to manage the DVR and view the cameras - sorry Mac users
- Camera and DVR performing adequately
- Successfully installed IPhone app and can view camera remotely
- Iphone app (zsight) is adequate, though flawed

Overall I am happy with the system at this price point.

Seller sold me a drive that advertised as new and had a functioning warranty. Drive failed within 5 months and warranty check via Seagate showed that this was out of warranty. Fraudulent sellers are here, be cautious.

Nine months in and failure. Product description clearly states '2 Year Warranty' yet Seagate warranty check indicates warranty expired. No date that it expired, just that it is. No response from Seagate either. What gives? Purchased the product because of the warranty instead threw away money and now have to cover out of pocket for a new drive. Very disappointed in Amazon and Seagate to be stuck in the middle as a customer and clearly misled on this purchase.

I put it into an enclosure, formatted it, and it hasn't worked since. Only 1 in every 4 computers will even recognize it.

thinking about returning it, I imaged my 5 year old WD disc to it and it just started to have this annoying, non-stopping grinding noise whenever the computer is on... plus the other reviews also alarms me, no one wants to have their system disc fail with important data on it.By the way, I have found seagate discs, when they fail, they fail completely, while other discs you actually can get something out....

I originally purchased 3 1TB drives for a Raid 5 setup. It ran fine for one year and a drive died. I needed my system so I ordered a new one with Prime shipping so I could be running. Needless to say the New drive failed within 2 months. I had already used the one I received back on warranty for a different purpose so once again I ordered one with Prime shipping to have it fail again. This time I am waiting for warranty and one of the originals died, less than 2 years old, leaving me with a raid 5 array without any data. Throughout the failures I originally tried different SATA and power ports thinking this could be an issue and on the last one I switched from onboard RAID to a RAID controller via PCIE to rule out anything onboard. I've dealt with dead hard drives before and it is usually no big deal, it happens. Having 4 in a 3 month period of the same model and from different lots, that's an issue. These will be the last Seagate drives I purchase.

Honestly from inception i had issues withe this drive. firstly, when I got it, it had windows 8 installed on it and well because it wasn't configured for my machine i had to format the drive which btw took a very long time way longer than it should have to format a drive this size. After fighting up with the drive for a couple of hours trying to get it formatted and even recognized by my machine, I was finally able to install my OS. Could be no less than a month the drive went totally bad, slowing down considerably and freezing every program i would try to run on it. Installed a SMART monitoring tool on the machine that indicated that the HDD had been seriously degraded and needed to be changed ASAP to prevent data loss. I honestly dont know if i had just gotten a bad batch or what but my experience with this particular Drive was not a good one AT ALL. I ended up buying a cheaper drive and that worked flawlessly, and being in the Caribbean it would have been a lot of hassle to ship this item back so i just count my losses.