We have 4 cameras on our house/property.
Plusses:
- You catch footage of **** happening on your property, like people messing with your cars, your neighbours dog crapping on your front lawn, people looking through your mail, etc.
- If someone damages something or claims to have hurt themselves on your property, you have footage of it.
- You can view your cameras remotely with most setups on your smartphone so you can keep tabs on things while you're away.
- You can stuff a massive hard drive in your recorder and have footage from 6-8 months back for no reason other than winding it back and watching yourself swimming in your pool in July, when it's actually December and you just shovelled the driveway.
Cons:
- The footage you get may not be of any use as sometimes it's too dark, sometimes people camouflage themselves (bandana, or in our case one time, a baseball cap pulled down very low) if they see the cameras but want onto your property regardless.
- The police may not be really interested in the footage anyways unless it involves some bigger crime in the area vs your own personal smash and grab form your driveway.
- I constantly have to clean cobwebs off our cameras otherwise they screw up the motion triggering and I get 14 hours of flickering cobwebs on the system vs anything actually interesting that I might have wanted to see instead.
In general, I do love having our cameras, but in the end it ends up being simply for the remote viewing on my smartphone. It HAS caught a few people messing with our cars over the years, but the footage always ended up being of no use because it was too grainy, or the perps had their faces hidden (aforementioned baseball cap guy), or in one case...the police were simply not interested.
I do still like having them though. I currently have a Lorex wired system. Not a huge fan of them anymore as they are VERY slow updating their software - my system will soon be partially obsolete once iOS11 is released for the iPhone as their app is so old it won't work on the new OS. I've been nagging them for 6 months to update them but they don't seem to care - I guess when iOS11 drops and countless thousands of people find they suddenly can't view their cameras on their iPhones anymore they might pay attention when their tech support people are overwhelmed and people start dragging them through the mud online.