Amcrest SmartHome 4MP Outdoor WiFi Camera Bullet 4MP Outdoor Security Camera, 98ft Night Vision, Built-in Mic, 106° FOV, 2.8mm Lens, MicroSD Storage (Sold Separately), ASH43-W (White)

Amcrest has another winner!
I was happy to be able to evaluate the ASH43-W. I had already been using an ASH22-W in my garage, so I was anxious to see how much difference there was between 2 and 4 megapixels. I decided to put the ASH43-W in place of the current ASH22-W. I have another unattached garage that I am going to mount the ASH22-W.For security purposes, I really wanted a high-resolution camera in my attached garage. I mounted it near the ceiling at the back of the garage. Mounted at that location, it has a wide view of nearly the entire garage, particularly the door. And when the door is open, the view then includes the paved area right outside of the garage. Mounting was a breeze. The peel and stick template was a very nice addition to make marking and drilling the mounting holes simple. I added a micro-SD card to the camera, prior to mounting it. I’ve always added a micro-SD card to all my Amcrest cameras, since I haven’t tried the cloud option yet.Adding the ASH43-W to my instance of the Amcrest Smart Home app was simple. As with my other Amcrest cameras, it’s simply a matter of scanning the QR code on the attached label and begin answering the prompts. A great feature is the ability to use ethernet or Wi-Fi. I chose the Wi-Fi option for my install. I really like the Smart Home app. I can use the app to view any of my cameras from the single app. When I receive a notification of any of the cameras, I go to one place to check the video. The Smart Home has a great interface for organizing the video recordings by date and time.The 4-megapixel video is much sharper. It’s very comforting being able to receive a notification that movement has been detected in the garage and be able to view a crisp clear video of what occurred. The motion detection is probably the most important feature. And that motion detection is enhanced even more by providing human detection. And both the motion detection and human detection each have separate schedules. Having a schedule for the notifications allows me to decide what time of day I want to be notified. I now allow Amazon to open my garage and deliver packages inside. It’s great to get a notification whenever they open the garage and make a delivery.The ASH43-W has many other great features. The camera’s night vision makes it seem like daytime, even when it’s dark. And if seeing wasn’t enough, I can also open the microphone and listen to anything going on. The continuous recording schedule allows for a custom schedule for different days and different times each door for the camera to continually record to the micro-SD card.One feature I have not been able to get working is connecting to the camera using the Real Time Streaming Protocol, or RTSP. I found this to also not function on the ASH22-W. All my other Amcrest cameras are easily connected to using RTSP. I’m assuming there may be a software issue with RTSP functionality. I have tried connecting with the VLC Media Player and a freeware camera streaming application called MotionEye. Either of these two applications work great with my other Amcrest cameras but I cannot get an image via RTSP with either the ASH22-W or the ASH43-W. I would highly recommend the ASH43-W.

Perfect wireless performance, solid picture quality
UPDATE: (2 stars to 1 star) Have been engaging with Amcrest support for months about the grey flash issue and no solution has ever been found. I now have two of these ASH43s in the hopes that the first one was just a bad unit. It wasn’t; both exhibit the problem. These ASH43s also seem to have difficulty recovering from power outages, being left in an “unable to login” state via RTSP until they have been manually restarted.Meanwhile the three ASH42s I have have been the most solid cameras I have ever owned. They have no grey flashes, no issues recovering from power outage, better wireless signal. But they retired them. So I’m not sure what to try next.UPDATE: (5 stars to 2 stars) This camera started off solid as a rock, but has fallen off of a cliff badly. I have 4x ASH42s all of which are older than this ASH43, and I haven’t had to touch them since setting them up. A few weeks after getting this ASH43 setup, it started to have grey flashes on random frames, wiping out the view from the camera on the RTSP feed. I tried every bit of configuration I could, reducing the FPS, the resolution, the bitrate, moving it to get better wireless signal, and nothing helped. The problem is intermittent but while it is occurring the picture is so obscured that the camera is for all intents and purposes offline.This camera shares a lot of the overall quality points in my Amcrest ASH42 review, so I won’t repeat myself too much and will do some comparing of the two.Wireless Performance – Solid as a rock. I have this thing on the corner of a house, 2 interior walls and 3 interior walls away from an access point. Zero issues after a week. Not so much as a blip. In wireless performance it may actually exceed the Amcrest ASH42Picture Quality – No complaints, wide angle, no noticeable pixelation. Honestly I don’t care as much about this so long as I can make out people and animals, so I’m not one to compare different cameras for picture quality directly.The Human Detection feature is very interesting; it seems to work well, though mine is in a place where it doesn’t get a lot of human traffic, more on the lookout for pets and other animals and just general security.Had one small headache with setup but was able to resolve it by resetting and going through the configuration again.Also something I’m noticing about Amcrest cameras: if you deal with a lot of bugs outside and spiders setting up on your cameras… for some reason this happens considerably less with Amcrest than with other brands? I’m assuming this is due to the way their night vision works, but now a full third of my dozen outside cameras have been switched to Amcrest, and I have never had to clean spider webs off of any of my 3 recent acquisitions nor my 5 month old one.