Wansview warning

I'm a little behind schedule in creating this post but for good reason. At the time of creating my first post I alluded to the fact that I had bought a couple of wifi ip cameras. The Wansview Q5 no less.
https://wansview.com/q5

Initially, I was fairly happy with these but I pretty soon realised that something was off. The wansview app constantly wanted me to sign up to their cloud offering and use their app. I didn't want to do this and only wanted to enable the RTSP stream and use this within my NVR setup which uses Motioneye.

For the most part this worked just fine. I stuck them in their own VLAN along with my other camera and for about 24-48 hours, no issues.

Of course with them being in their own VLAN, this meant I was unable to use the app. Not a problem, until.....

I woke up one morning and both cameras were showing offline. I tried rebooting them but to no avail. I had to drop them out of the VLAN to check the app and as soon as I did this, they came back online. Put them back into the VLAN and same thing happened a couple of days later.

I also noticed that the RTSP stream was poor, like really poor. This could have been a bandwidth issue with the wifi but I didn't look into this too much as I also noticed that there was some outbound traffic to backblaze. Something I had not allowed or agreed to.

It was at this point that I reset them and returned them for a refund.

I can't help but feel that some of my data here is now on a chinese server somewhere and I feel embarrassed for not realising that this was a risk with these.

I have since obtained a Reolink E1 pro camera and the quality of this over these is night and day! I mean this has far more weight to it and when setting it up, I wasn't pestered to setup an account and use their cloud storage like I was with the Wansview camera.
https://reolink.com/gb/product/e1-pro/

I'll look to post a review of this at a later date once I've used it for a while but for now, its working really well!