 With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. So this is a little new for us, and full disclosure guys, we're only doing this review because these guys, KGuard, reached out to us when I happened to be already shopping for a monitoring system for our headquarters. So I actually don't know if their Aurora series AR421CKT001 is necessarily the best thing for the price, but what I will tell you is that it's been torture tested beyond just reviewing it. It's been torture tested as if we're going to actually deploy it because we are going to actually deploy it. The unit came well packaged with everything safely tucked in, the cameras were in protective foam, and inside the ample, nicely built outer box, the included cables are fairly unexceptional in terms of the quality, but they're nice and long at 60 feet, and they're completely standard, so they have one BNC connector and then one DC connector that comes out of each end of the cable, so you could replace them with something else if you wanted to. It should be noted, one of them is thicker than the others for the higher end camera, and that is to support the motion tracking feature of it, and it's got a little tracking control toggle right on the camera. I personally didn't find the motion tracking that useful since I'm more interested in constantly monitoring my employees here, but for some people it would be great because what it basically does is it takes any motion on the screen, digitally zooms into it, enhances it a little bit, and then it can do all kinds of cool stuff like start recording, so it can trigger a recording, or it can email you a snapshot whenever something moves in that zone on the screen. This would be great for something like your front door. The inclusion of a mouse along with the remote in the box was a little bit confusing at first, but when I started navigating the menus it made a lot more sense. The unit definitely operates best with a mouse. So let's get on to general specs and functionality. The DVR outputs to VGA, composite, or even HDMI to up to a 1080p display, TV or otherwise. The cameras themselves are weather resistant and record in 800 line or 700 line resolution with 30 meters and 20 meters of night vision, depending on which model, so I got one of the higher end one and three of the lower end ones with this particular kit. It includes a 500 gig drive inside. This is one of the first thing I did was like rip it open and find out what was inside. It's just a standard Seagate Barracuda. I would have liked to see a NAS grade drive in there such as a WD Purple, but most people will probably never notice the difference. And the good news is it's extremely easy to open up and replace with something else if you want to. All right, so let's get into the quick start guide. It's actually really solid. So all you do to hook it up physically is plug in your four BNC connectors, plug in the power to the DVR unit here, and then plug in an additional power adapter to the wall, which has four pigtailed connectors to power the cameras themselves. You position the cameras wherever you want them, plug in an ethernet cable, plug in HDMI for monitoring, and boot this bad boy up. It drops you into the quick start menu, which for straight recording and live monitoring is pretty much plug and play. You can set it so that the quick start menu comes up every time or it doesn't come up every time you power it on. You can disable it. And yeah, I think my mom could actually set up this just basic monitoring and recording. I did again, I found it quite slow to navigate with the remote. Didn't find the remote that useful. I suggest that people keep a mouse, you know, just kind of hooked up to it and nearby. But once you get things going with the mouse, everything in the menu is fairly intuitive. So you right click to confirm left click to go back. If you've ever used Android with a mouse and you'll be quite familiar with that. And, you know, some of the headers aren't that well named. But the good news is that the manual is surprisingly good. So I was able to figure out what everything does and everything largely works with one exception, which was a little bit disappointing. I wasn't able to get the Dropbox feature working. What that does is when you trigger a particular event, it can take a snapshot and then automatically upload that still to Dropbox for you. I suspect it has more to do with my ISP than the unit itself since they weren't able to replicate my issue. But their support was overall actually extremely helpful. All right, so let's get into live monitoring and DVR control. So that's going to be in display over here. There's a few different things you can do. You can set up so you can pick all or one on cycle. So actually, we're going to go here out of the menu, out of the menu. OK, so that's all down here. So you can pick a single screen. You can go, OK, I want to spy on Luke or I want to spy on the new guy or oh, my goodness, is that a bathroom? Or you can cycle through or you can see all of them or you can cycle through them and you can change the cycle speed by just going into display and then auto sequence, changing the dwell. You can also change things like the actual layout of the screen of them on screen. So because they have models of support to 16 cameras, that's more of a concern for those ones because if you have four cameras, you're probably just going to want the two by two since there's not a lot of other options there. You can this is kind of cool. You can actually mask off certain regions. So in that bathroom, for example, we had masked off a bit of a privacy zone here. So you can just kind of go, OK, we don't want to see people's pee-pees and, you know, whatever's going on in that corner, we're not that interested in that. You can mask that off and that'll actually be masked off in the recorded file. You can toggle the camera name as well as the timestamp on and off. So there you go. So see that up there in the top. And then you can trigger alarms. Now, alarms can be used for all kinds of useful stuff. Let's just go into the alarms setting here. There we go. Alarms can be used for all kinds of useful stuff, including disk error, motion and video loss. So, yeah, guys, in the spy movies where they just like cut all the wires to the security cameras and nobody notices because they just happened to not be. This is like a home or small office class DVR and it supports triggering an audible alarm when video is lost. So there you go. Anyway, you can also add on additional sensors, but that's not something that we did. Motion is something that I think will be used by the widest variety of people since it's it's pretty useful. So it can be done by schedule. So you can have you can just have it recording at times or you can have it actually triggering an alarm if there's motion at times. So I'm going to go ahead and there we go. So the schedule here, there's normal or there's alarm. And then you can adjust a whole bunch of the settings inside of it as well. So here we go. Sensitivity can be changed to anything from profoundly not useful because it's not sensitive enough all the way up to profoundly not useful because it's too sensitive and everywhere in between. You can set up so that only a certain area triggers an alarm. So right now I have it set for the entire screen to trigger an alarm. But if I was to say, for example, not care if Luke is benchmarking, which is his actual job, and I only want an alarm to go off when he sits down, you can see that those red ones spin in your chair like you're having fun at work. He's going to refuse to do it. Hey, Luke, spin in your chair, spin in your chair. There you go. So you can see the red dots going off because he's clearly having way too much fun. Thank you very much. All right. So you can manage what an alarm trigger does, including setting up a pre record window before the triggered events. So you get a little bit of pre footage, a post record window, pan, tilt and zoom, which is supported by the DVR, but not by these cameras. Unfortunately, the alarm ringer can go off anywhere from 10 seconds to 30 minutes, and it's extremely loud, which is why I have it off right now. It's not something that we want to be having go off while I'm trying to do a video here. And then you can set up push notifications or email notifications as well as that Dropbox feature that I told you about before. Now, when you consider that a home alarm system with no video will cost you however much a month and basically is doing the same thing as this, except now you get a live view of the action. Six hundred bucks actually sounds like a pretty good bargain if you don't mind the setup under information. You can head over to record to see what kind of quality you're recording in, which you set up in the sort of the other menu. You can also see how much data you're taking up per hour. Then if you go to disk management, you can set up how you want it to overwrite automatically, whether by capacity or by days or just never. Although it's not necessarily something I'd recommend. If you plug a USB drive into the back, you can go ahead and format that and you can offload footage to it by using the, ah, yes, the record search here. So this is kind of neat. In fact, I'm going to go try and find a clip to play for you guys that has the the motion tracking feature on Luke's camera working. There we go. So let's go ahead and play back so you can go ahead and scrub through the footage. See? OK, there you go. There you go. So you're able to see that Luke's camera is looking for motion and then zooming in a little bit on it as well. You can scrub through the footage just like that, pick a different time. It's not the fastest, most responsive thing in the world, but if you had an approximate idea of when a theft in your store took place or whatever else, then you wouldn't have too much difficulty tracking it down based on the UI here. Permissions within these menus can be controlled by user account. By default, there's just one admin account. And I didn't play around with it too much because I can't think of a reason why anyone else would really need to use it. One thing that was kind of funny in the playback and review section is that they did some QC testing on my unit on the 6th of January. Unfortunately, it looks like I have it set to overwrite by date, so it's not there anymore. But there you go. They do actually test them before they go ahead and ship these babies out. There are some color settings that you can play around with. I didn't really find them necessarily that useful. You can adjust brightness, contrast, hue, stuff like that. And then you can do that by channel or on all of the channels. And the image quality overall, you know what? It's not the same as having a bunch of HD camcorders set up as a security system, but it's functional. You won't be reading a license plate from across the street, but if you were just trying to get a good look at a shifty character like our new guy here, you'd probably be able to... it's better than a composite sketch based on someone's imagination that they give to the police, for example. Back to network setup for a minute. Other than the Dropbox feature, UPnP dealt with the port configuration. And this was kind of cool, as their mobile app actually worked effortlessly, which was surprising to me because I've used some of the consumer-grade Wi-Fi cameras, and their mobile apps tend to be really, really terrible. All you do is fire up the app, KView QR, you go ahead and add a new camera by just scanning the QR code that's on the top of your unit, and then you just go ahead and select your camera. Just go ahead. I unplugged my ethernet cable on the back of this. We'll be back in a moment. Oops. And we're back. Anyway, the apps available on iOS and Android is fairly straightforward. You can take screenshots. You can check which channel you want to monitor, if nothing else. Even if you don't care about remote monitoring, because you can do it on a PC as well. You don't have to do it on your phone. Even if you don't care about it at all, it's pretty useful when you're running around the house or the office setting up the cameras, because you can actually have a live view of what you're looking at as you walk around and try to work on it. So what's the conclusion here? I mean, it's hard to say. You know, it's like, you know, it's pretty cool. You can monitor your employees. You can, you know, monitor the backyard. I think the one thing that I guess felt kind of missing, like, because I'm not a super heavy user, like I just wanted some basic video monitoring. So the one thing that I kind of felt was missing is I'm a bit of a pack rat. So I wouldn't have minded some kind of a networked NAS, NAS automatic backup of the footage so I could archive more of it. But I guess I could just put a bigger hard drive in. The one concern there is if I like if I was a thief breaking into a house and I realized there was a camera system, I'd probably try and find the box that goes with it. But then you could always be smart about that and hide it somewhere or make it somewhere difficult to access. And then also just have a home alarm system so they don't have a whole lot of time to look for it until the cops come. And that's what maybe that maybe that's all a non-issue. I mean, like I said, I haven't tested many other products in the category, so I can't really compare to anything else. I'd love to hear your guys's comments. If there's something else that I should be checking out, it's definitely like much more feature complete and much better to use than a lot of the consumer grade like nanny cam on steroids style home monitoring Wi-Fi cameras. Way, way better than that and not even that inordinately more expensive. But let me know if there's anything else that you feel like we should really be checking out in this category. I think that's pretty much it guys. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment in the video and let us know if you have any other thoughts about it, any requests for other like, you know, security system stuff. Or if you thought this was totally stupid and we should never talk about this category again, that's fine too. And we do have a support link in the video description as well. So you can support us by giving us a monthly contribution to help us make more videos. You can support us by buying cool t-shirts like this one. And then you can also go ahead and change your Amazon links in any country pretty much to our affiliate code once we get a small kickback whenever you buy random crap on Amazon. So thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Okay, are we done? Sorry, I got to take like a wicked pee. What? Ah, the light's out. Okay. All right, there's a camera in here, isn't there? I guess I'm showing you guys the infrared feature. So this is what it looks like at night. Spooky vision. Okay, we're actually done now.