AJAX NVR DC 8CH (8 MP, 1 HDD) - DC-POWERED VIDEO RECORDER

What DC actually means in the model name

The standard Ajax NVR carries a built-in 110-240 V power unit inside, while this version replaces it with a low-voltage board rated for 8-16 V DC, so the recorder is wired straight into a twelve-volt line. Anyone who has lived through long outages will recognise the value: a battery or a DC-UPS feeds the device directly, with no double conversion from 12 V up to mains and back, a step where an inverter wastes a noticeable share of the charge and runs hot. Rated consumption is up to 24 W including the drive, so a battery of roughly 100 Ah can in theory keep the recorder itself writing for about two days. The trade-off deserves attention before you buy: the low-voltage board takes the place of the mains unit, so a wall socket alone is useless here — you need a stable 12 V source with enough current, and both its cost and its space in the cabinet belong in the project. Where the grid is reliable and no battery backup is planned, the plain Ajax NVR with its 220 V supply is the simpler and more sensible purchase.

A recorder with no screen: everything happens in the app

This is a deliberately headless device — no HDMI, no VGA, no USB ports at all — and the initial setup runs from a smartphone over Bluetooth, after which the unit works through a single RJ-45 network port. Live view and archive playback happen in the Ajax apps, mobile or Ajax PRO Desktop, which is convenient exactly as long as a phone or a computer with access to the system is within reach. The price of that compactness is plain: you cannot attach a monitor to this model at all, so the "screen next to the cashier" or "TV in the guard room" scenario is simply out of scope. In exchange the enclosure stays genuinely small at 193×193×47 mm and 583 g without a drive, and it hides on a shelf next to the router instead of demanding rack space. When a local display on site is part of the requirement, the catalogue has the Ajax NVR HAC with an HDMI output and a built-in viewing interface; this model is the right pick when smartphone control is all you need.

Eight channels, 8 MP and up to 100 Mbps of incoming traffic

The recorder takes up to eight cameras recording at up to 8 MP and 25-30 frames per second, with total incoming bandwidth rated at up to 100 Mbps — more headroom than the HAC series offers with its eighty megabits. In practice that margin means eight 4 MP cameras in a normal profile produce roughly 32 Mbps and still leave room for several 4K streams on the points that matter. Push all eight cameras to 4K with a high bitrate and the total approaches 60-70 Mbps, which is worth checking against your network because the recorder's own port runs at 10/100 Mbps. The design rule follows naturally: keep high resolution where a face or a plate has to be readable, and settle for 4 MP on the overview shots of a yard or a corridor. Both H.265 and H.264 are supported, but H.265 roughly halves the file size for the same picture, so it is worth enabling on every camera that can handle it.

No PoE ports — the switch is a separate line in the budget

This is the detail that surprises people during the first installation: Ajax recorders deliberately carry no built-in PoE ports, only a single network socket on the back, which turns camera power into a separate task. For comparison, the Hikvision DS-7108NI-Q1/8P(D), the Dahua DHI-NVR1108HS-8P-S3/H and the Reolink NVS8 from this same catalogue all ship with eight PoE ports on board, where every camera gets data and power over one cable with nothing else in between. Eight Ajax cameras drawing around 7-8 W each call for a PoE switch with a budget of at least 60-70 W, and buying one with no headroom is a mistake — cheap switches sag under full load precisely when every camera switches to night mode with illumination. There is a paradox specific to the DC version worth spelling out: if the recorder runs off a battery while the switch sits in a wall socket, an outage leaves the NVR happily recording nothing, because the cameras go dark with the switch. So a DC build needs either a switch powered from the same 12-48 V battery line or a shared UPS covering both devices, and that decision belongs at the design stage.

How many days of archive one drive really holds

Inside there is a single SATA bay for a 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive of up to 16 TB, bought separately — no storage is included in the box. The easiest way to estimate depth is through daily volume: with H.265, continuous recording costs roughly 22 GB per day for a 2 MP camera, about 43 GB for 4 MP and about 86 GB for 8 MP. Eight 4 MP cameras therefore consume around 344 GB every twenty-four hours, which works out to roughly 23 days of archive on an 8 TB drive and about 46 days on a 16 TB one. Run all eight at 8 MP and even the 16 TB drive holds only some 23 days, while an 8 TB one lasts little more than a week, so a "one month of footage" requirement has to be checked with a calculator before the disk is ordered. Motion-triggered recording stretches those figures three to five times on a site that is quiet at night, but there is no RAID and no hot swap here — one bay only, so choose a surveillance-grade drive designed for round-the-clock writing.

Ajax cameras, third-party brands over ONVIF and detector scenarios

With Ajax cameras the recorder behaves as part of a security system rather than a standalone box: cameras and detectors share one app, scenarios work across them, and visual alarm verification means a detector trigger arrives together with footage from the relevant camera. Third-party cameras connect over ONVIF Profiles S and G and via RTSP, which in practice covers most current IP cameras from Hikvision, Dahua or Imou. From a third-party camera you will get a live stream, continuous or event-based recording and archive access; what you will not get is the manufacturer's own analytics, detection zones and scenarios, because ONVIF carries video rather than a vendor's logic. Built-in motion detection runs on the recorder itself across all eight channels, and the app lets you switch between analysis performed by the NVR and the camera's own algorithms. The conclusion is practical: if the cameras are someone else's and no Ajax system is planned, a recorder from the camera vendor makes more sense; if an Ajax hub is already installed or budgeted, this pairing extracts the most from the hardware you are paying for.

Where this model belongs and when to choose another

IP20 protection and an operating range of 0…+40 °C define the location unambiguously: a dry heated space — a cabinet, a store room, an office — and never an unheated garage or an outdoor box. The plastic enclosure weighs a little over half a kilogram, needs no rack, and Ukrainian manufacturing brings a 24-month warranty instead of the twelve typical for imported recorders, plus service that does not wait on shipments from Asia. Typical sites are a private house with a perimeter, a small workshop, an office or a shop where an Ajax alarm is already running or planned, and above all where the surveillance has to survive a blackout along with the rest of the low-voltage system. Do not buy it if the plan involves more than eight cameras: channel count cannot be expanded by any firmware update, and a year later a second box becomes inevitable, while sixteen-channel Ajax models do exist in this catalogue. Conversely, if backup power is irrelevant to you but a local monitor is required, the Ajax NVR HAC with its HDMI output is the logical choice within the same family.

If you are unsure which drive and which backup power source fit your configuration, send us the number of cameras, their resolution and the archive depth you need, and we will size the whole system for you, switch and battery included.