Recommended 360 Degree Fisheye Cameras

I wouldn’t recommend the Reolink FE-P for use in Blue Iris and instead the Loryta would be my top pick for an indoor only rated camera with a good mix of daytime and nighttime video quality, sound quality, ease of use, and compatibility and I was surprised how well Blue Iris person detection and facial recognition worked on these cameras, despite the warped fisheye video feed.

If you’re not a Blue Iris user and you want to use your 360 camera stand alone with a phone app, the Reolink is by far the best option. Not only is the Reolink app extremely user friendly compared to other manufacturer apps, but it’s got a ton of options for dewarping both live view and recorded footage including the dual panoramic view and hemispheric view that Blue Iris offers as well as a quad view that lets you individually focus on 4 separate points of interest within the 360-degree video. As for recording and playback, Reolink’s built in person detection works very well and is a huge step up from the contrast-based motion detection you find on most cameras, and the Reolink app makes it extremely easy to find person detection clips stored on the SD card. Reolink also makes a Wi-Fi version of the 360-degree fisheye camera called the FE-W that may be even more ideal for this kind of camera since it’s important to install them as close to the center of the room as possible and being wireless gives a little more flexibility in placement.

The Amcrest IP12M-F23-80-EW, an outdoor rated 360-degree camera with a 1.85mm focal length and a super high resolution 12-megapixel 1/1.7” image sensor. In my testing the Amcrest had 180 degrees of vertical and horizontal field of view and output a very clear true fisheye image. The Amcrest was extremely simple to set up with DHCP and ONVIF enabled by default, as well as Dahua’s new more user-friendly web interface. I was able to add the Amcrest to my Blue Iris NVR using ONVIF discovery and easily change settings using that new Chrome compatible web interface.