The Best Hikvision NVR for 32 Cameras

[Keoni Granger]

The Best Hikvision NVR for 32 Cameras

DS-7632NI-I2/16P // DS-7732NI-K4/16P // DS-7732NI-I4/16P // DS-9632NI-I8 // DS-9632NI-I16
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There are a variety of NVRs to choose from for 32 camera systems, each NVR differs in spec and capabilities in one way or another so it can be difficult to figure out which unit is right for your system. There are 3 main families: 7600, 7700 and 9600. Within these families are 2 series: -K series or -I series.

In this post we'll break down the main differences between each NVR to hopefully make the choice less confusing.

Key Features and Specification

The 96 family are clearly the top tier option with high bandwidth capabilities and a lot of SATA interfaces. They also offer RAID which isn't available with 7600 or 7700 family NVRs. However, they have no built-in PoE ports so all cameras would need to be connected over the network.

All of these NVRs also support smart features from Hikvision's cameras and a range of other features such as HDD quota and smart search.

Let's take a look at some of these key features and what they mean.

Recording Resolution - The resolution of a camera tells us how many million pixels will be in it's images. 8MP = 8 million and 12MP = 12 million. Currently, the highest resolution available in Hikvision's most recent range is 8MP. This is really high quality and pretty much the best consumers can get on the market for a CCTV system.

12MP cameras are rare and tend to be something like a DS-2CD63C2F-IVS Hikvision Fisheye camera. However, 12MP spread across a 360° field of view isn't actually very impressive and the image would seem of low quality.

To summarize the above points, any of the above NVRs would be a great choice unless you were looking to use above an 8MP camera in which case you couldn't use the DS-7732NI-K4/16P. If you'd like to see some different resolution's compared please see our post on differences in camera resolutions.

Incoming Bandwidth and H.265+ - You may be wondering how you're supposed to know how much incoming bandwidth is enough bandwidth to support your32 cameras. Below is a guide to roughly how many Mbps are needed by 3MP, 5MP and 8MP cameras from the Hikvision EasyIP 3.0 (G1) Family:

With H.265 at 15fps -
3MP - 2.5Mbps
5MP - 4.2Mbps
8MP - 6.7Mbps

With H.265+
There aren't any exact measurements for how many Mbps are used by cameras running H.265+ yet but Hikvision's literature tells us that H.265+ offers a 83.7% saving over H.264 and a 66.8% saving over H.265.

In conclusion, you could use 32 x 8MP cameras on all 4 NVRs and have no incoming bandwidth issues.

Please see here for an article explaining H.265 and H.265+ video compression.

H.265+ also offers a huge saving on storage needs meaning that hard drives will reach maximum capacity much slower. Western Digital Purple hard drives are recommended for CCTV use and are available in a range of sizes from 1TB-10TB. I use this storage calculator to help customers choose a hard drive size.

Outgoing Bandwidth - This tells us how much outgoing traffic the NVRs can handle. This covers things such as remote viewing your system from a browser or from an app such as Hik Connect. If you'd like to know how Hik-Connect works you can take a look at our post explaining Hik-Connect in a nutshell. We can see from the comparison that the 77 family has a slightly higher outgoing bandwidth than the 76 family.

Physical Differences

7600 Series

The DS-7632NI-I2/16P is the smallest of the options with only 2 SATA interfaces.

7700 Series

The 77 series is a noticeably bigger to make room for the additional 2 SATA interfaces inside. You'll also notice that there are more alarm interfaces than the 76 series.

9632NI-I8

The DS-9632NI-I8 is even bigger and houses a lot of buttons with an older design.

9632NI-I16

And finally the DS-9632NI-I16 is the biggest and most powerful of all the units.

A Couple of Differences to be Aware of

In November 2017 there was a new V4 firmware release for Hikvision NVRs which changed the user interface dramatically. However, this firmware was only made available to the -I series NVRs and this is still how the situation remains today. We aren't sure whether this firmware will be made available for the -K series.

You can look at our article about the New Version 4 Firmware for Hikvision NVRs if you'd like more information.

Hikvision also recently released a video called "Hikvision Product Lecture -- I series NVR V4 .1. 50 Firmware Introduction" which will explain a few more of the key differences.

One other thing to note is that only the -I series NVRs support POS integration.

For some users this may be enough of a reason to make the jump from the -K to the -I series. For others, it may not be an issue but it's something we like to mention so that our customers are aware!

What's in the Box?

• NVR
• Power supply
• SATA cables
• A short network patch cable
• Mouse
• Screws for hard drives
• Software disk (The software disk is often out of date so please check here for the most up to date Hikvision software)
• User manual (Customers often complain about how unclear this manual is so we wrote our own "Getting started with your Hikvision system" tutorial which we think is much better )

Why not Hiwatch NVRs?

Something we've been asked about recently is whether we plan to stock the Hiwatch series of NVRs and cameras. We decided not to sell Hiwatch for a number of reasons but it boils down to quality and future-proofing:

• Only cameras up to 4MP are supported
• Only supports H.264+ video compression
• Hiwatch NVRs don't receive any firmware updates
• There has been reported issues about mixing Hikvision cameras with Hiwatch NVRs and vice versa
• Hiwatch is already being phased out to make way for another budget series called Hilook

To summarize the most important points:

1. The DS-7632NI-I2/16P has the least amount of SATA interfaces
2. The DS-7732NI-K4/16P doesn't support 12MP cameras
3. All of these NVRs have a max incoming bandwidth of 256 Mbps or above
4. All of these NVRs support H.265+
5. The 96 series are the most powerful/high end models with a lot of HDD space and RAID capabilities
6. The 96 series has no built-in PoE ports

Hopefully this has made the choice a little easier!

If you're interested in which is the best 4-Channel NVR then please take a look at one of our previous articles.

Take a look at this article if you are trying to figure out which is the best NVR for 8 cameras.

If you're choosing a Hikvision NVR for 16 cameras then please have a read of last weeks article.

As usual, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us!