Firmware Updates and Release Notes

I know you have had this feedback from myself and I am very sure others before. But I really would like to see Annke change their stance on firmware.

Your customers are a technical audience. We can cope with this and expect it.

We want to see firmware updates we can download and we need release notes with them so we know what has been fixed, any new features that are introduced, other changes and issues that are still known etc.

My most recent I91BS (C800) purchases have shipped with newer firmware than my other cameras of the same model that I already have (which themselves originally had mixed versions). You don't list this newer firmware to download. Surely if you are shipping hardware with firmware you regard it as a stable and recommended version? Customers want the option to align all their cameras to a single firmware release for consistency.

Also there are changes that are not obvious without release notes. In the newer firmware, ONVIF is enabled by default, but only works with the admin account. In the older firmware ONVIF has to be enabled, but there is functionality to add users. I had to contact support to figure how this worked in the newer release (not that I think this particular change is good progress). But perhaps there are other variances I am missing similar to this example.

I find motion detection is not as good as I hoped. With the human detection enabled, it still gets set off by cats. I've no hope this will see improvement as you never release newer firmware for general consumption.

For my need the C800 at the price point they are at are good value and although I would like it to be different, I can accept the lack of firmware support. However I was tempted to invest far more and buy NightChroma series cameras. However these are 4x the price and I could not justify that spend knowing how poor the firmware support is. Had I decided colour night vision was the way to go for me, I would have pursued a route to source Hikvision devices for this one reason.

Please change the "we don't recommend firmware upgrades" approach.