need min. 4, outdoor, don't need to be remote control, sound (listening) on one or two ok;

what are y'all using? these will be hard wired as our wifi sucks & most of these will be mounted
on the house, so running power not an issue.

i know there's as many options as money to spend, but i'd like to stay as close to $500-600 as possible

thanks in advance

I bought an Annke DVR  on Amazon and then used various cameras I already had.  I put a 1 TB Hard drive it it.

DVR was stupid simple to set up, probably didn't take 10 minutes. I have 8 hardwired night vision cameras, some CCD, some CMOS.

I have had good luck with the Zosi Cmos cameras. Besides those parts, you need power supplies and cables.

I think almost all of them are chinese, I bought a GW security, NVR, POE, 8 cameras, 1 TB hard drive -- I bought it 7 years ago and its been flawless.    I don't need the ap or any other fancy BS, just the ability to record, preview, review, etc.  Its great sitting on the couch watching the tube, I can see all over my property

Reolink is straightforward and POE keeps it simple.
Just pick the camera style you want and buy the NVR kit with that camera.
Amazon has an their stuff.

I use Blue Iris.  It's expandable, customizable, and easy to use.  Started out with 4x4MP cameras on an old windows machine.  I now have a dedicated server with over 20 cameras (most are 8MP), night color and license plate readers on it's own dedicated machine with storage that goes back to May of 2020.

I ran UniFi Video at the barn for several years (keeps the snowflakes from accusing us of animal cruelty) but Ubiquiti shutdown the cloud portal and something caused the NVR that I had built for the purpose to go off the rails the other month so I begrudgingly upgraded to Unifi Protect using a Cloud Key Gen 2. By upgrade, I mean forklift as I couldn't even get the Unifi-Video service to finish loading on the server (it could completely lock the server up and lockout management) so I had no way of creating the backup that one could simply load into Protect.

Anyway, Protect has been operational and stable for the last month it's been running out there. Being able to run the "NVR" off of PoE was a nice bonus versus the old Dell PowerEdge tower...

Keep the info coming, I'm looking for a similar setup since I'm buying a place and I'm gone a lot.

It would be nice to be able to monitor remotely but not necessary.

I installed a hdd into one of these and set it up in our local conversation club's indoor range and clubhouse.  A member brought in some cameras he had from another system, and we have the option of using coax or poe IP cameras.  It connects to our router so we can use a laptop or a phone app to view.  The setup screens have instructions for connection through the internet

The cameras we're using are not real high definition, but it allows us to recognize cars coming and leaving through the gate plus people leaving and entering the building and storage rooms.

Axis cameras and Motion software on FreeBSD.  Completely roll-your-own but I don't have to worry about some shitty Chinese company deciding they don't want to support something  proprietary 2 years after I bought it.  I store media locally and rsync captures offsite to rsync.net so if some steals the whole damn system I'll still have recordings of them doing it.

This. Arfcom has thousands of reolink cams  and has had them for years.

I second the vote for Reolink. I installed four cams outside. Works great for me.