griffonsystems

Alex, What are you using for the VMS for those cameras in the school?

yeah the 300 is a beast you can light up a football field was the only option my mfg rep in my area had but it pairs well with the m12

buell, call raytec direct and tell them the distance of the shot and they will spec the right one for your application, they are very helpful and will get you a demo to test -- i had the 3 panel raymax 300 120vac unit on that shot for testing

and m12 45 with the raytec ir light -- 70ft from camera to fence

rory here is a shot from a test i did with a m12 under no light conditions, no moon - i don't have the lux level, should have measured but didnt at the time. this shows with m12 and then m12 with raytec ir

d24 45lens testing bill recognition - went well - xga rez

night shot attached- ill throw them both on tinypic later no housing needed for any of mobotix cameras, all poe and all outdoor rated (ip65 and ip66(x4 models) ratings)

mobotix m12 90 degree lens (580kb file down to 147kb to comply with site post size)

you have a lot to configure with the camera to get a better picture, the defaults aren't going to work with that scene -- call mobotix tech support in the morning and get transfered to international support, setup the camera for remote access by port forwarding ur router, ask tech support to checkout your camera at night and they will make changes and then tell you what they did so that you can learn let me know how it goes paul

give me your exposure settings and general settings and i will make recommendations

just run parallels and xp pro on mac and you're set well thats what i have running on my macbook pro -- I can wait on a mac release if that will aid in the 3.0 release coming quicker

the q24 is using the same board as all the 24 models so it would just be like the bw d24 where it would be bw all the time -- the dont believe in any moving parts in their cameras so i dont see a cut filter being installed anytime soon to give you color day and bw night -- the m12 just uses both sensors so maybe they can fit the 360 lens on the new m14 and you'll have a 180 degree pano in color and b&w, we can only hope i guess

i give out my demo camera free don't charge anything but thats just me i guess it does have wdr ability -- you set exposure zones in the shot and the camera will adjust accordingly - put a box over the glared out window and it reduces the shot so its not glared anymore this is not the camera for low light situations like a dim bar, it needs light to produce a good picture.. they are coming out with a b&w version in 2010 that will be used for bad lighting enviro's -- you'd be better off with a m24 or d24 with b&w sensor with a 90 degree lens -- color and megapixel and limited light dont work, its gotta either switch to bw or be bw all the time to give a good picture

call a local partner and have them give you a demo camera for a week or so -- i do that all the time here in chicago, i'd let you remote into my q24 but its with a client for a demo that is going to purchase that unit -- feel free to ask me any "real world" questions about the unit

the feature of using the sd card as the ring buffer will be a software update but only with the new models as I understand so anything with the 4 as the second number q24, d24 m24, etc. the m24 is shipping in europe next week but wont ship to at least end of the year for the us and the m14 is still a few months off wireless is reliable if setup correctly. the q24 will probably come out with a night version, ie bw sensor, but not a day/night version since putting in a cut filter would be a moving part and their whole thing is no moving parts in the camera -- all the x4 models are using the same board so if they make a night sensor itll be for all units

if your dvr is only able to record at a max 704x480 whats the point of having a 540tvl camera?

with those open public bids I always say the company that makes the biggest mistake wins the project.. if it's not your company and you could care less about margin and you are just under pressure to win deals then you somehow justify 1k for install for a job you know is going to take you over a week to pull off. I try and stay away from those type deals unless i help design the project good luck with the next project, dont beat yourself up about it we have all been there but you learn what deals you can win and ones you need to walk away from

really do a lot of research into the back end of a system like this.. that will make or break a project like this..how many people will be accessing the live feeds of the camera, how many will be doing queries into stored video, how many live display monitors do they want as part of the system, etc. better to over deliver on back end hardware and network infrastructure (quad core servers, GB poe managed switches -- most ip cameras are 100 Mbps but make sure you have gig uplinks to the storage servers/application server if you're going with a nvr/vms centralized solution and even the viewing stations should be on gig not 100)

currently if you have it setup to store to a nas or shared drive somewhere on your network and the network goes down it will not switch its storage automatically to the sd card... that is something that will change when the sd card becomes the "ring buffer" but currently it uses just the 64mb flash memory in the camera so watch what you are promising at this point there is a script using firefox browser and using microsoft scheduled tasks where it will schedule a download of the entire sd card back to a pc... so lets say you have the camera setup on recording to the sd card and the network goes out for a day the camera is still recording and then once you have network again the script runs and pulls down all that data so you have the 3 days or so that can be stored on the sd card and then it sends that data every 3 days to a pc for longer term storage -- sounds good right ok now the m12 you can connect a backup power source to the serial port so if the poe goes down the camera continues to be powered and i only buy the secure models, im not even sure why they offer anything less because the price is not a big difference but the resolution and functionality is a big difference in the lower models

not all cameras but the m12, d12, q24 and d24 all can accept sd cards to record to so no network needed. all cameras have 64mb of flash memory inside that is used as a ring buffer to help buffer the video stream but the cameras will soon be able to use the sd card as this buffer so you could have 32gb of buffer which would be amazing -- the network could go down for several days and you wouldn't lose any data. currently the camera goes to the ring buffer first then streams that data to the sd card or to a nas, shared drive, etc.

a night version of the q24 is in the works

i did a quick test with the raytec 300 and a mobotix m12 - stills here and i will get around to the live video shot... i was only standing about 75ft from the camera but i'm looking to test at the actual site in a week which needs coverage of about 150-200ft http://s922.photobucket.com/albums/ad70/griffonsystems/?action=view&current=mx10-3-178-89_2009-10-15_214740.jpg

i will post the video this week

you can select mjpeg over mxpeg for the compression codec in mobotix..not sure about that home automation i only do comercial projects but good luck