HIKVISION DS-2CD2T43G2-4LI (4 MP/2.8 MM) - PoE IP CAMERA WITH 80 M ILLUMINATION

Smart Hybrid Light and 80 metres: the longest reach in the series

The LI in the model name stands for Smart Hybrid Light: the camera carries both infrared LEDs and white-light LEDs, and the 4 in front of them marks the 80-metre version (the 2LI variant of the same camera reaches 60 m). At night it runs in discreet 850 nm infrared mode by default, and the moment the on-board analytics classifies a person or a vehicle in frame, the white light fires and a black-and-white silhouette becomes a colour image in which the jacket is blue and the car is a silver estate. Four supplemental lighting modes are available, so you can keep IR only for covert monitoring, white light only for permanent colour at night, the automatic hybrid mode, or switch illumination off entirely. Eighty metres is roughly double the 30-40 m typical of this category, and the elongated housing is exactly what pays for it — every extra metre of reach needs stronger emitters and more surface to shed their heat. There is a trade-off worth planning around: a bright white beam at that range is clearly visible from the street and can dazzle drivers or annoy neighbours, so on a tight plot it is wiser to leave the hybrid mode with short bursts rather than run white light permanently.

4 MP, a 2.8 mm lens and true 120 dB WDR: what you actually see

The 1/2.9" sensor delivers 2688 × 1520 pixels, about twice the information of a 2-megapixel camera, which in practice means you can zoom into a recorded frame where 2 MP would leave nothing but a blur. The official DORI figures for the 2.8 mm version are: detection 63 m, observation 25 m, recognition of a person 12 m, identification of a face 6 m. That is the single most important thing to grasp before mounting: the illuminator throws light 80 metres, but confident identification of a specific individual only works within the first few metres, and beyond that you reliably get the event, the direction of travel and the object type rather than a portrait. The 104° horizontal field of view covers a whole yard or an entrance gate in one shot, yet a wide angle always means a smaller subject in frame — number plates need tighter optics, and the same camera exists in 4 mm and 6 mm versions where recognition distance grows to 15 m and 25 m respectively. True 120 dB WDR solves the classic gateway problem: when the camera faces a gate against a low sun, or watches a car emerge from a dark garage, a camera without WDR blows out the bright half of the frame and loses everything in shadow, whereas here both zones stay readable.

AcuSense, generation G2: the camera tells a person from a branch

The G2 index is not a revision number, it signals AcuSense — deep-learning analytics that runs inside the camera itself, not on the recorder and not in a cloud service. The camera classifies the object as a human or a vehicle and makes the alarm decision on that basis: line crossing and intrusion into a zone are configured separately, and each rule can be limited to the target type you care about. The gap between generations is not academic. Neighbouring G0 models in this same catalogue, the DS-2CD1341G0-I or DS-2CD1321G0-I, only offer pixel-change motion detection, which means alerts for every branch, shadow, cat and rain shower; a week later the owner mutes notifications and the system stops working as security at all. Here both push alerts and the white light are tied to classification, so the camera does not flash a spotlight at every gust of wind but reacts when a person actually enters the zone. One honest limitation: there is no separate animal category in this model, so if a large dog roams the yard freely you cannot filter it out as its own type and will have to tune zone boundaries and sensitivity by hand.

Power, housing and mounting: what to budget for

The camera takes either 12 V DC (0.83 A, up to 10 W) or PoE 802.3af Class 3 with a 11 W maximum, noticeably more than the 7-8 W drawn by the dome models of the same family, and the reason is that same 80-metre illuminator. The planning consequence is concrete: eight of these on one switch means roughly 88 W on the ports alone, so an inexpensive 8-port switch with a 60-65 W total PoE budget will not carry them and you need headroom from 120 W upward — a figure to settle before the cable goes in, not after. The housing is all-metal, 88.7 × 93.1 × 286.7 mm and about 1.15 kg, and that mass on a long arm needs a solid substrate; screwing the bracket into a layer of facade insulation foam is asking for the camera to drift over time and knock your detection zones out of alignment. IP67 sealing and a -30…+60 °C operating range are built for year-round outdoor duty, and the lower figure is the practically important one: cameras rated only from -10 °C frequently refuse to boot after a winter power cut. For awkward positions the manufacturer offers dedicated accessories — the DS-1275ZJ-SUS pole mount, the DS-1276ZJ-SUS corner mount and the DS-1260ZJ junction box, which also hides the cable slack and the connector from moisture.

Storage: cards up to 512 GB, ANR and H.265+

There is a microSD slot for cards up to 512 GB, and it is more than a nice-to-have: paired with ANR, the card automatically keeps the footage the recorder missed during a network break or a switch outage and uploads it into the main archive once the link is back. H.265+ cuts the stream several times over compared with H.264 on a static scene, while the 32 Kbps to 8 Mbps bit-rate range lets you deliberately trade image detail against archive depth. As a rough yardstick, one 4 MP H.265+ stream on a quiet scene runs at about 2-3 Mbps, roughly 25-30 GB per day, so a 256 GB card holds something like seven to ten days of continuous recording from a single camera — and about half that on a busy road where the picture never stops moving. The camera serves three streams at once (main 2688 × 1520 at 25 fps, a 720p sub-stream and a third up to 1080p), so the recorder can store full quality while the phone app pulls the light stream over mobile data without stuttering. Recording straight to a NAS over NFS or SMB/CIFS is supported, up to six clients can watch live with no recorder involved at all, and the open interfaces — ONVIF Profile S and Profile G, ISAPI, SDK, ISUP — let the camera join a third-party system.

Where to install it and the jobs it was built for

This is a long-range camera, and it earns its keep on elongated sites: a long fence line, a driveway, the lane between warehouse buildings, a depot perimeter or a car park where the furthest point you must cover sits 40-70 metres away. The classic layout for a private house is one of these on the corner of the plot looking down the fence, plus a dome with a 30-metre illuminator by the door: the far camera owns the approach and the gate, the near one delivers a face good enough to identify. The long metal body also works psychologically — it is visible from a distance, and for a share of intruders that alone is enough; at the same time a camera on a long arm is easier to knock aside or twist than a dome, which is why mounting below 2.5-3 metres is a mistake. In a flat, an office room or a small retail floor the model is simply out of place: at 5-8 metres an 80-metre illuminator only blows out the nearest objects, the size and weight look absurd indoors, and 104° is more angle than a room needs. Do not shoot through glass either — any IR illuminator reflects off a pane and floods its own image, so a view from a window requires genuine outdoor mounting or the illuminator fully off plus a separate light source.

How it differs from its neighbours in this catalogue

Its closest relative is the DS-2CD2T83G2-4LI: identical housing, identical 80-metre illuminator, but an 8 MP sensor. Paying extra for 8 MP makes sense if you intend to crop a plate or a face out of a wide shot, and makes none if the stream is heading to an older recorder that cannot handle 8 MP on every channel at once. The DS-2CD2T47G3-LIY is a ColorVu camera: permanent colour at night without a white spotlight, but 60 m of reach and a fundamentally different approach to light — choose ColorVu where some ambient lighting exists and continuous colour matters, and this model where the scene goes fully dark and maximum distance is the point. The bullet-style DS-2CD2063G2-LI and DS-2CD2083G2-LI with 40-metre illuminators are more compact and easier on the power budget, and for a yard no deeper than 25-30 metres they are entirely sufficient — there is nothing to gain from 80 metres there. On a tight budget and a small site, look at the entry-level DS-2CD1043G2-LIUF: it has AcuSense too, but 30 m of light, a simpler housing and weaker wide-dynamic performance. Conversely, if you need a tidy camera on a facade or under a canopy rather than long reach, this catalogue also carries the DS-2CD2143G2-LIS2U dome and the DS-2CD2343G2-LI2U turret — the same 4 MP AcuSense core with hybrid light, but 30 m of range and a far less conspicuous shape.

Tell us the perimeter length, the number of entrances and the furthest point you need in frame, and we will pick the focal length and the number of cameras for your specific site and calculate the PoE switch headroom you need.