SVAT PI1000 Covert MPEG4 DVR - Recording System with Built-in Color Pinhole Surveillance Camera Hidden in a Motion Sensor

These are perfect if you want to place in an area of the Hotel Room while you are on vacation; but if you're trying to install them in your home to monitor child activity or actively outside your house the product is horrible. If you use batteres (4) alkaline; the device will most certainly drain them before a full day of recording; the electrical cord that comes with it is only 3 feet long and is visitble should you try to put it somewhere where the product looks real. The top things off; the video playback only goes to about 480p and to set it up so you actually get an area you're trying to record you have to hook it up to the back of a TV; then hope or wish you got the area right; then dissconnect the cable to the TV and pray you got it right; you can view the area like you would with a Camera System; I bought 2 of these with the memory disks; worst purchase I've made in years.

There is a learning curve on setting this up, but not all that steep, and quite a bit of it is intuitive.About yhe only quibbles I have is that I can find no reference in the instruction and spec manual to the fact that if the power is cut, the installed batteries do not appear to keep it running. At least, the video output goes away and the SD card didn't show anything when I pulled it.Which does somewhat defeat its purpose.Second qubble is that unless disguised as something else, which, fortunately, isn't all that tricky since it isn't all that big, its appearance is more likely to draw attention than get it ignored by the sort of people one least would want to do this, since they would be more likely simply to take it, along with whatever they came for, than not.Which would also rather defeat its purpose.Leaving those two caveats aside, it is a very neat device, and the one I bought came with a 2 GB SD chip rather than the 1 GB SD I expected.Since I did not know for sure exactly where I would wind up wanting it, and its size makes it quite portable, I mounted it on a wheel from a 5" caster since it is not designed to stand up by itself, and this made placing it upright on a shelf with the best tilt much simpler. And permits concealment of both the power and video feed cords.Would be better if the video jack were not on the top of the unit, would make disguising its function a bit easier.Or else a right-angle flat black video plug were provided with the PI1000.Or failing this, The video output were resettable so as to let the PI1000 lie on its side while still providing an upright image.It is supposed to be covert, after all, and a bright yellow video connector sticking out of the top doesn't really do much for this.Too eye-catching.Sorry about that.

This was a pain to set up. The directions were useless. Unless you are going to plug this in I would not even bother because the motion sensor doesn't work properly. I was hoping to catch a thief who was stealing from my mother who was in assisted living. It did not work long enough on battery to do me any good. After several more missing dollars I am said to announce that she passed away and we never caught the thief. We gave the thing away to another lady who will have her son connect it to power. We had to put it in the closet so of course we had no power source. Very dissappointed and would not recommend this product. Would have sent it back but I gave it away the same day my mother passed. I was very upset! The only good thing I can say is that the picture quality was good enough you would be able to identify someone...if you can catch them that is.

I have been playing with this camera for a week now. It has a lot of good things going for it, which are mentioned in other reviews: very good video quality with sufficient lighting, useful modes of operation and it is easy to review the captured images on any reasonably new television. However- and it's a biggie!-you WILL need to use the power adapter instead of trying to run it using batteries.. I put in 4 new AA batteries at first and tried it out. I placed the camera in motion mode. The batteries shot about 5 minutes of footage in an 8 hour period before they stopped. I bought the recommended lithium batteries. In fact, I bought the ER "Ultimate" Lithium batteries. At $10 for 4 of these, I was certainly hoping for a good result. What I got was less than 15 minutes of footage in a 12 hour period before they stopped. I thought for sure something was defective with my camera, but the next time I connected with the power cord and it filmed just as I had hoped. Now, the problem is, that the manual would leave you to believe you could get 12 hours of footage using lithium batteries. Instead, what you get is 12 hours of monitoring by the camera with very little (in my case, less than 15 minutes of footage). I spoke with customer service at SVAT and was told that this camera is ONLY meant to be used with a power cord and that the batteries were ONLY to be used as backup. I would have liked to have known that before I made the purchase. That's why I'm telling you. It may very well make a difference in whether or not you can use this for home surveillance. I am not sure where I can place the camera that I can hide the cord. It is supposed to look like a motion sensor in an existing security system. None of my motion sensors have wires dangling from them. Worse, the cord is only 5 ft. or 1.5m long, so you will almost certainly need an extension cord to plug that power adapter into a wall outlet. So now you have a sensor with a cord hanging down, connecting in the middle of the wall to an extension cord which runs to the power outlet. Not exactly discreet! You may find a place you can use the device, but you should know on the front end that that will depend upon whether or not you have a very nearby power outlet where a "motion sensor" would look appropriate.

This little DVR system is really good. so far it's been reliable, fairly easy to setup and it has good picture. The view angle is just enough but wider would be better and it needs to be placed in some lighted area to work.Mariano T.