Ubiquiti's G6 Edge cameras have been landing this quarter, and the way they have been described online has caused some confusion. The camera records to a card in its own housing and does the detection work on board, which people have read as "you no longer need a recorder."
That is not how we build them, and the reason has less to do with cameras than with where this product sits in Ubiquiti's range.
These are enterprise gear, and the enterprise line is about redundancy
Ubiquiti calls the G6 Edge "a new era of enterprise surveillance," and that word is doing real work. Look at what they have shipped into the enterprise range over the past couple of years and the same idea shows up every time: assume the primary will fail, and design so the site keeps running when it does.
Their Enterprise Fortress gateways run active-passive failover, so a second gateway takes over when the first one dies. The Enterprise Campus aggregation switches do multi-chassis link aggregation, which lets two physical switches behave as one and keeps traffic moving when either is lost. E7 access points have a 10GbE primary uplink and a 1GbE secondary port, so an AP can take power and data from two different switches. The Enterprise NAS runs ZFS with RAID-Z and hot spares, on redundant hot-swap power supplies.
The card in a G6 Edge is the same thinking applied at the camera. It is not there so you can skip the recorder. It is there so that losing the recorder does not lose your footage.
What that means in practice
Recorders fail in ordinary ways. A drive dies. A power supply gives out. Somebody unplugs it to run a shop vac and forgets to plug it back in.
And in the case that matters most, a break-in, the recorder is often the thing that gets taken, because anyone doing this for a living knows where the footage lives. A camera holding its own copy is the difference between an insurance claim with video and one without. Redundancy only helps when there is a primary for it to back up.
Can these cameras run with no recorder at all? Yes, and for a shed at the back of a property where pulling cable to the house is the whole cost of the job, that is a reasonable way to do one camera. But standalone should be a decision you make deliberately for a specific location, not the default you land on because a product page said it was possible.
What the G6 Edge line is
Three shapes: dome, turret and bullet. All use the same 8MP sensor at 3840 x 2160, up to 30 frames per second, on a 1/1.2 inch chip. That sensor is large for this class of camera, and it is why low light looks better than the older gear we have been taking off walls.
Each has a 2.36x optical zoom (roughly 5.9 to 13.8 mm), so the field of view is set when the camera is mounted rather than locked in by whichever fixed lens you ordered. Infrared reaches about 40 m on the dome and turret, about 60 m on the bullet. Our post on night vision covers why those numbers matter less than people expect.
On-camera analysis handles people, vehicles and animals, with licence plate and face recognition available. Two-way audio is built in.
Because this is the enterprise line, it is priced and specified accordingly. For a house wanting two cameras on the front and back doors, a standard G6 is usually the sensible buy. The Edge series earns its cost where an outage or a missing clip has a real price attached, which in our experience means shops, farms, contractor yards and anywhere holding stock.
Three things to check before you buy
The power budget is real
These are PoE+ cameras, and the turret and bullet draw up to 25W each. The dome is gentler at 15W. Put four turrets on a small switch and you will run out of power budget well before you run out of ports. Our guide to PoE budgets explains why the number on the switch box is not the number you get.
The cold rating varies by model
The turret is rated to -30°C. The dome and bullet stop at -20°C. Norfolk, Brant and Oxford all spend a few nights below -20°C most winters. Under a soffit or in a covered entryway any of the three is fine. On an exposed pole out toward the lake, we spec the turret.
Face and plate recognition bring obligations
Both are off by default and on a house they should usually stay that way. On a business, recording identifiable people puts you under PIPEDA: you need a real reason, signage, and a retention policy you can describe to whoever asks. We wrote up what PIPEDA means for cameras in Ontario and we go through it on site before anything is switched on.
How we build these
Cameras on the doors and approaches that matter, a recorder sized for the retention you actually want, and cards in the cameras so the recorder is not a single point of failure. Our storage math post is still the way to work out recorder capacity, and nothing here changes that arithmetic.
Two habits worth adopting: put the recorder somewhere that is not obvious and not beside the front door, and keep cameras on their own VLAN, for the reasons in our post on camera VLANs.
We install Cat6 drops from $195 and Cat6A from $245, technician labour runs $135 an hour locally and $150 an hour on the Hamilton to Oakville side, and hardware is quoted when we scope the job. Outside our Norfolk home zone, visits 31 to 60 minutes out start at $395 and visits an hour or more out start at $595, with the day's work counting toward that minimum. Every job is quoted in writing before we start.
If you want someone to walk the property and say where cameras should go, or a second opinion on a quote you are holding, see our security camera installation page, check the areas we cover, or get in touch.
Sources
- Introducing G6 Edge Series - Ubiquiti
- UniFi G6 Edge Bullet tech specs - Ubiquiti
- UniFi G6 Edge Turret tech specs - Ubiquiti
- An Overview of High Availability in UniFi - Ubiquiti Help Center
- Ubiquiti Enterprise NAS Review - StorageReview
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