ᐅ Home Entrance Surveillance: Is the Axis M3215 a Useful Choice for Me?

Dear community,

We are currently considering entrance monitoring for our house. Our electrician offered us an Axis M3215 camera at a reasonable price, including installation. Since this is a completely new topic for me, I’ve been doing some research and would appreciate your feedback.

Initial situation:
Network cable is located in the upper corner, driveway is about 6m (20 feet) long. The camera will be powered via PoE.

Requirements:
We want quick access to the live view via an app when someone rings the doorbell. An audio signal is not necessary. The camera should also record events when, for example, a person or animal enters our yard. I’m still unsure about storage options. So far, I thought a cloud service would be the best choice. Right now, I’m leaning towards an SD card for the short term and a NAS in the network cabinet for the long term. I do not want to subscribe to any storage service. We are iPhone and Mac users (please don’t bash 🙂 ).

Open questions:
1. Is Axis and the mentioned model generally recommended for my case? Are the 2 MP of this camera sufficient, or would the larger M3216 with 4 MP be better?
2. Axis offers a range of software. Is the pre-installed software or web interface sufficient, or is additional software required? I want to avoid ongoing costs.
3. According to my research, Axis focuses on offline storage of video footage. How long would a 64 GB SD card last approximately if it only records events? I’d prefer not to swap the card every week.
4. I plan to purchase a NAS for backups in the future and place it in the network cabinet. Is storing video footage on the NAS straightforward, or are there other factors to consider?

Here is a photo of our entrance area. I appreciate any input. 🙂

Axis is a major player in the video segment.
The modules are mostly shared by Hikvision, Sony, and Axis.
Mobotix is also becoming increasingly popular.

2MP cameras are sufficient if there is enough light intensity (considering night-time issues).

Almost all cameras actually offer loop recording.
The storage volume should be enough for your needs, as long as you don’t intend to review the last 20 months retroactively in Full HD.

Using a NAS is definitely possible, but @rick2018 can probably provide more details on that.

I would always choose higher resolution if I have the option. AXIS itself definitely gets a big thumbs up.

AXIS can write directly to NAS drives, which I would definitely prefer over local storage! I have had excellent experiences with AXIS and Synology in several systems. Remote access via DS cam works either through a private VPN or Synology’s access service. The data is always stored locally on the NAS.

Hello,

we also have 4 cameras from AXIS to monitor the house – they seem to have a good reputation here in the forum as well. The images are very sharp. As far as I know, recordings are stored for over 1 month. The cameras record continuously and notify you in the app with a bar indicating events, so you know when and who has entered your property at what time.

Great, thank you all. I also met the electrician on site today and discussed my concerns about compatibility between Axis and Mac OSX. He then showed me the app on his iPhone and the features I was interested in. There, he has a timeline where motion events are highlighted in red. He was able to show me an event (leaving the garage) that is stored on the camera’s SD card directly at the site. To be honest, I didn’t expect that I could remotely access the saved video via the app; I thought this was only possible from within the same network.

In conclusion, I asked him to choose the better model with 4 instead of 2 megapixels. However, he has already ordered the smaller one.

Just be careful that the electrician doesn’t set up any unnecessary port forwarding on your network.

And the intruder who doesn’t want to be seen later will simply tear off the camera along with the memory card. As mentioned before, I would recommend recording externally.