I’ve had the JideTech 8M PTZ dome camera (the “P1 PLUS” revision) installed and running for over a week now. It has been feeding into Synology Surveillance Station, but I’ve also done some activity with the camera using the Android application (AC18Pro). I also have a couple of other PTZ cameras, including one from JideTech, in use so I’ll provide some contrasts with them.A few weeks back one of my three existing, 10-year-old, fixed position cameras started having issues. Rather than just replace one I decided it was time to update the entire set. This was the last of the set and the only one which was moved to a new location, from inside to outside. I decided it was time to have a camera in position to monitor the front of the house. After some surveying it became apparent that the best option was a PoE PTZ dome camera handing under the eaves near the front door. It is being powered by a 30W PoE+ injector through about 40’ of Ethernet cable that is a mix of Cat-6 and Cat-5e.This camera isn’t tiny. Having to hold the full PTZ mount, computer, and lens assembly requires some space. However, it isn’t that big. Around 4” side to side and top to bottom. Outside, you don’t really notice it. It would have been better for me to have a black body on the camera instead of white, and JideTech does show that option on their website, but after reaching out to them I found that they are not selling it in the US via Amazon at this time. Using their email support address to reach out, they came back within a few hours so that is a good sign for them.The housing is metal. It looked like plastic at first glance but it is definitely metal, including the mounting base which is an impressively solid piece. If you need to access the camera, such as to install a memory card, the lens cover with half of the shell unscrews from the other half and there is a rubber seal between the two sections. Don’t overtighten when you put it back together or the seal will bulge out.One last note on aesthetics. The slight vertical curve on the body and no visible screw holes is a nice change from other offerings out there which look like plastic toys screwed to the ceiling through the body.Using the camera with Synology Surveillance Station, I’m able to use the pan, tilt, and zoom functions. The camera, which is 4K (Ultra-HD or 8MP, whatever you want to call it) uses standard 16:9 aspect ratio. The side-to-side viewing angle appears to be at or maybe a little past 90 degrees. Not bad, but could be a bit better if it pushed out to 110 degrees like some cameras do. It would also be nice if JideTech published better specs on the camera such as horizontal and vertical viewing angle. One good thing here, although the camera is advertised as using H.265, it also supports H.264. This is important because Synology Surveillance Station does not work well with H.265 video.Night vision is good on the camera. There is a street light across the road from me but I can see much better via the camera than with my own eye looking out the window when in night vision mode. One surprise with the camera is that it supports three streams, at different resolutions and refresh rates, instead of the usual two. Auto-focus is a fit finicky. It is supposed to refocus continuously or any time the camera zooms. I’ve found that it only wants to refocus when I adjust the zoom. If I repoint to a new location I may find the image out of focus until I zoom in a bit and then back out.Software is where this camera is let down somewhat. I’m fortunately relying on Synology for all the important things but better built-in camera software would have helped. Once place where the interaction between the camera and Surveillance Station are hurt is with the camera presets. The camera presents 254 presents to external consumers even when none are defined! I’ve setup four preset positions, and I can switch to them, but having to deal with the long list of non-working entries is really annoying. The interface between the camera and Synology is handled via the ONVIF interface, so my guess is that this is an issue with how the camera presents the preset list.I’m relying mostly on Synology for motion detection, but I did try out the camera functions. Unfortunately, most of these were a disappointment. The AI detection would point out people and cars, but it had two major flaws. First, even parked cars would be detected as a vehicle and trigger both a flashing box and an alert. That doesn’t work for a residential street where there are almost always parked cars. It needs to only activate when the car moves, or give an option for that. Second, and this may be an issue with the AC18Pro app, notifications were not reliable. I would get no notifications for a long time and then suddenly a whole batch would fly in at once. There were also a few notifications for false events as I’d get one for a person being detected, while looking at the camera, and there was nothing there.One major missing feature on the onboard camera software is tracking. I have a $40 PTZ camera in my garage that will follow a person as they walk around. Why can’t a camera costing four times that much do the same?Moving on to the AC18Pro app, it isn’t too bad. I’m not taking full advantage of the camera, such as using onboard storage, so some of the features don’t do anything. However, the app does give good control of the camera and shows thumbnails of the preset positions which makes it easy to select which one to move to. You can tell that the app isn’t specific to this camera as there are some features (such as iris control) which don’t do anything and some configuration options have no labels on them. One good thing about this app is that you don’t have to be on your local network to use it. I’ve accessed the cameras using the app when away from home.Although you can do some setup using the AC18Pro app, to really get into the weeds on this camera you need to use the web interface. First up, is the issue of finding the camera. The included instructions, which are just a fold-out quick start guide, say to load an app from the mini-CD that is bundled in. This app appears to be a tool for managing configuration of multiple cameras and was next to useless. You are better off going to your router and seeing which new device joined the network last. After that you can go to that address via a web browser and do the heavy work.First thing you want to do in the web interface is set a static IP address, especially if you are going to use the camera with a NVR application. You don’t want the IP suddenly changing. After that, there are a lot of configuration changes you can make. One to consider is setting up the camera to use NTP (Network Time Protocol) to keep the clock in sync. You can also turn on or off all of the tracking features. Expect to spend a lot of time in this interface getting the camera setup the way you want.The camera is powered by Linux. You can see the kernel information via the web interface. Supposedly, you can update the software from this interface but no updates were showing as available and the current software was dated 27 June 2022. Based on the web interface, the Linux OS, and the way some features are listed but not present, I think this camera is being powered by a Rasberry Pi with a third party PTZ mount and optics package that interface to the Rasberry Pi and are controlled by an off-the-shelf software package. This is probably a good thing. It means that JideTech handles physical integration but are not responsible for the ground up software. Using a software package that supports multiple vendors may have some quirks but is likely to be more solid.Security wise, the camera appears pretty good. At least it doesn’t have any hidden open ports. I did a port scan on the camera and the only open ports were ones listed in the web interface, all of which can be configured or disabled depending on which functionality you want.Finally, lets talk about documentation. There is none! The quick-start guide has just enough information to get the camera connected but anyone with a bit of experience is going to ignore it as there are likely other options for doing things that are better. The camera has tons of options and there isn’t a bit of documentation on any of it. An entire small book or a website could be dedicated to how to configure and manage this camera as there are numerous screens in the configuration section of the web interface. I’m a very tech savy person, and there are quite a few options in there that I have no idea what they are for.So, with the issues I’ve described above, why am I giving it five stars? Well, it does have a lot of good going for it. The camera looks better than many other offerings and the performance, with a third-party NVR platform, is certainly adequate. If it had a few more features that are found on cheaper cameras, an event notification system that behaved, and (most importantly) documentation it would be an unquestionable five-star product.What I find odd is that the market is saturated with wall mount PTZ cameras, but when looking at ceiling mount dome cameras the list dries up. Having so few options to choose from, especially at consumer friendly prices, leaves the JideTech 8MP camera at the top of the list of what you can get.