buellwinkle

They are the big boys, the largest surveillance camera company in the world, but they don't sell to consumers or resellers. They sell OEM and expect the OEM to handle support. For example, Q-See is an OEM of Dahua cameras and Dahua expects you to go to Q-See for service and support. Think of it like buying an iPad, who do you go to for support, the manufacturer, Foxconn in China, or the distributor, Apple? But if you buy gray market cameras from people that buy cameras in bulk in China and then sell then on eBay without Dahua's authorization, you have to do due dillegence to see if they provide the resources to support you like a website with all the downloadables like manuals, firmware, software, a viable warranty and a help desk.

Czy używać maszyny mgła?

Yes, manual adjustments for focal length and focus.

ACTi is coming out with a new low light dome in January if you can wait, 1080P, great low light performance.

Dahua will put cameras on their website that may not be available for several months. Still waiting for the 2MP mini bullet they posted 2 months ago that they said will be available at the end of November.

I like Mobotix, have many D14s installed in our community, but with the N32 lens and 1.22MP resolution, at best you can ID someone at 10-12'. Even with their longest lens, the N135 which we use in some locations, you may ID someone at 30'. Use the lens calculator here - http://cctvlenscalculator.com/ to figure out what lens focal length you need to ID someone. I would shoot for at least 100 pixels per foot to ID someone. It defaults to meters, you may want to change that on top to feet. enter in the lens, the resolution, the distance to object, the height of the camera.

Vector, I'm amazed that you can spin the camera around over and over again. Most PTZ cameras let you go 360, stop and return 360, not do 720.

Get the ACTi KCM-5611 and put it on a patrol to zoom in & out to capture someone at 130'. At it's widest angle, 4.7mm if I remember correctly, the best you'll be able to ID someone is about 25'. You'll need to use a good amount zoom to ID someone at 130'. You may need suplemental lighting, but I would install the camera first, see if additional lighting is needed and add it in later. Getting an illumunator that can honestly do 130' is going to set you back some coin, more than the cost of the camera, so see if you can put IR illuminators closer to where you want to capture someone.

With IR on? The specs say 10W and I had issues with too many cameras on a Trendnet switch with the camera powering down when IR came on.

Image and lighting looks good. Can we assume that was a totally dark warehouse with just the IR illuminator for light. I like the wide even spread of the illuminator.

These are very low end camaras, actually the same Aptina sensor as on the older ACM-1231 and not really a huge bargain when you consider this is closer to a TCM-1111 in features which you can buy for about $100 more and get true commercial grade camera support and software. But check out the Dahua IPC-HFW3200C, that has an awesome Sony Exmor sensor and better varifocal lens, in a different league than this camera. This camera is more for someone looking to get started and has a low budget.

Hey, we all would love commercial grade Cisco switches, but when someone asks for a switch for a Dahua camera, I'm not sure their budget for a switch is as high as the cost of all their cameras combined, LOL....

Razer, I get the passion for Cisco, a trusted name in commercial switches, but let me tell you why I didn't consider Cisco. The model you mention, a managed 8 port PoE switch has a 62.5W maximum, a problem I had with Trendnet is that I ran out of power before running out of ports and I was at best getting 3 cameras per 4 ports of PoE. ZyXel, when they say 8 ports of PoE, they mean 8 at the full 15.4W of power, where the Cisco would average only 7.75W or about half the power. If you have mostly IR cameras, at best you are pushing that number to it's max, in reality, many cameras exceed that number and all my cameras at the moment, indoors or out are IR. You start adding newer cameras that have motorized focus and focal length, maybe powered zoom, brighter IR LEDs and you start using audio in/out, alarm in/out and I could see power creeping to the point where 7.75W is not going to cut it. The equivalent to the switch you have is the ZyXel ES2108PWR, managed 8 port switch with a gige uplink. Costs about the same price as the Cisco, but is full power PoE on all ports. I wish I could have bought the Cisco, but the 62.5W was the show stopper for me. I didn't buy that ZyXel switch becuase of costs, I cheaped out and got the unmanaged switch for less than half the price, but that's a personal choice.

These are a PITA to get perfect, I know, I have two ACM-3511. As you put the dome on, it pushes the gasket and the lens, drives one crazy for sure. There's an article with tips that may help. Go to www.acti.com and click support and knowledge base and search for the word dome and there's one called "Tips for 3-Inch Dome Installation". Hope that helps. I got so frustrated on one I just left the dome off and I get a great picture, better than the other one that's installed perfectly with the dome.

If you already have an investment in Exacq, I would hound them to the fix your issue and if they can't, make them give you a refund. If a company says they support a camera and it doesn't work, why should the consumer be punished. If they refuse to support the product, assuming you pay the annual fee, I would have an attorney send them a demand letter, that usually gets their attention.

Get a camera that can record locally to SD card or NAS drive at full resolution. Then use a second low resolution stream to view the camera live. When there's an incident, drive out there, swap SD card or NAS and view the video back in the office where you have unlimited very high speed access to the video. We use mobile broadband via Verizon Wireless (part owned by Vodafone in Europe) in the U.S. and we do this and it's cost effective. If we want to look at live video, it's done at VGA resolution at a lower frame rate but it records at full frame rate, full 3MP resolution on a Mobotix camera to SD card in low traffic areas and NAS in higher traffic areas. Our costs are fairly low, 4GB is $30/mo and $20 per location up to 5 sharing that same 4GB. If you want to look at 3MP all day long, 24/7, you will not be happy with the costs. Also, Axis can write to NAS or SD card, look for Axis camera that have Edge Storage.

Yes, avoid Ubquiti if you don't want to burn our your cameras with the wrong voltage. Here'a a picture of an 8 port Trendnet (4 PoE, 30W aggregate max) vs. 16 port ZyXel (8 PoE, all full power). Yes, the ZyXel is bigger, but twice as many ports. To me it's way cleaner than when I had 3 Trendnet 8 port switches to handle 8 cameras.

Typically, the higher the megapixels, the higher the pixel density, the poorer they do at night as each pixel is smaller and not able to absorb as much light. I've yet to see a 5MP camera that does well in low light. The 1.3MP from Brickcom or AVTech will do pretty well in low light. Brickcom does have a U.S. office, but very small. My distributor carries Brickcom, and if you seen my review, it has their contact info at the end and they can put you in touch with one of their resellers that can help you. Brickcom does not have an Android app that I know of.

Those are tough demands. To ID someone 50' away at night would be nice. Check out a good lens calculator where you can plug in camera resolution and lens choice and such. It will give you viewing angles so you can see how wide an area a particular lens would cover. Then assume you need the subjects head has to be at least 80 pixels tall to be identifiable so you may need say have at least a 5MP camera to cover an area the width of the front of you home. But you can also use a 1MP camera if you only want to cover a small area. http://cctvlenscalculator.com Once you figure out your resolution vs. lens compromise, that will help figure out where to start. At 50', you'll need external illuminators despite camera specs that say it will work.

It is a very unique camera and when you consider there really aren't any 1080P PTZ outdoor speed domes on the market that are cheaper than that.

Different brands have different value propositions. Also, the cost of an individual cameras may be just a small percentage of the overall costs of wiring, NVR, installation and configuration. For example, I use Mobotix in our community because we don't need an NVR, the camera does all the NVR functions so we don't need as complex of a network and I know they are long term reliable. During a recent project, it was decided we should find cheaper cameras, so OpenEye was chosen. After OpenEye failed to deliver the quality we expected, we returned everything and the cost of Mobotix was really only 10% higher even though the individual cameras were half the price. Why? No NVR is one reason, but the other is installation costs were more than half the project. At home, I don't need the feature Mobotix offers and wiring and installation are easier, so I use ACTi because they provide a better value for my use case than Mobotix and the free NVR software is a big plus. At my weekend home, I use Axis and AVTech because of their notification features that make sense at that location and being a condo, does not have outdoor cameras. So to say one brand is better than another depends on your use case. To say one is cheaper than another depends on your use case. There's two brands that have cameras that can record to a NAS or SD card are Axis and Mobotix. You don't need an NVR or NVR PC saving money on the acquisition costs and long term maintenance and electric costs. The brand that provide very good free NVR software is ACTi, so you may want to take that into consideration. Dahua offers a very good low cost solution at the expense of support and customer service. Also, not many NVR software works with Dahua. Avigilon specializes in very high MP cameras for specific use cases and sells through dealers. Since they don't sell through distributors, I don't know much about them.

Not sure if Salesguy has the IPC-HFW3200C, it uses a lot more power than the IPC-HFW2100 for example.

I've been testing with 4 cameras, but all SD card. I still want to test to NAS, just out of town today but will get to it tomorrow. The PC does not have to be on to record, only to view, so you can take advantage of sleep mode on PC's or turn them off at night or share a PC with other apps.

I originally ran ACTi NVR software on a Atom based net top, a Zotac ZBox to be specific with 6 cameras, all 1.3MP and it worked well, very low CPU usage. The smallest you can go is to get nothing. For example get Axis cameras with SD card slots, record directly on the camera. Then you only need a dedicated PC. You only need it when you want to look at the cameras or recordings using the free Axis Camera Companion software. I'm working on a review now that hopefully I'll publish by the weekend. 32GB SD cards are pretty cheap now and you'll save electricity and space.

Am I missing something? Isn't the point of this post to show images from cameras so people can see how well or not so well specific cameras work? By just showing an image with no specifics, what's the point? Should I post pictures from my megapixel phone camera and not tell you what it is and let everyone guess or worse, mislead them to think is an IP surveillance cameras?