buellwinkle

Have you read this? http://www.acti.com/getfile/KnowledgeBase_UploadFile/Pan_and_Tilt_Scanner_for_ACTi_Zoom_Cameras_20110503_002.pdf

You have DSL at 1MP up, that's amazing. Did you test that at test sites like speedtest.net or speakeasy.net? Fastest I could find for DSL was 756Kb/s. So say you have a reliable 1MP upload speed, not much latency, you may be able to get a single 1MP or maybe a 1.3mp camera, like 720P with h.264 compression and run it at 15fps. Of course, the assumption is you don't use that internet connection for anything else. A good value outdoors is the ACTi TCM-1111, runs under $300. On the bargain end, the Dahua IPC-HFW2100 or IPC-HDW2100 can be had for under $200. Both are capable of FTP'ing video events. ACTi provides NVR softwar free, Dahua does not. For Axis, with camera companion, I believe the lowest priced outdoor camera that supports this feature the M31-VE at about $500.

I reviewed the IPC-HFW3200CN and there's day and night videos in my review on my blog. I want to review the 1.3mp cameras, waiting to hear back.

Are these indoor or outdoor cameras? I'll assume you don't want HD/megapixel cameras give your DSL limitations. Axis makes their M1013 for indoors, cost under $170 and supports what they call Edge Storage, meaning the cameras can write directly to NAS storage. Also, they have H.264 compression you'll need. You don't need to PC for this to run, just straight from the camera in one location to a NAS in another. You can buy lower end NAS devices for $150-250 from Western Digital and Buffalo. When you want to view the cameras on one screen or view the recordings, you use their free Camera Companion software. Where to buy? BHPhotoVideo.com has it for $169, pick it up at their store in NYC or order online.

Most cameras have the ability to FTP video. Try setting it up to FTP a video on motion detect directly to the Buffalo NAS and review that video to see if the problem is with the camera or with the NVR.

This is a day camera, not meant for night performance without adequate white light. So it depends on how much white light you have at night and every situation is different. I would say their low light performance is good, but not a substitute for having a proper day/night camera. The review on my blog of the HFW-3200CN does show a night shot in color day mode with a street light and 2 front porch lights in comparison to the same shot in night mode. For about the same money, I would get the Dahua IPC-HDW2100 1.3MP day/night camera with the built in illuminators of you intend to use it at night in a poorly lit area.

Or a Rottweiler or Pit Bull (the dog, not the rapper).

I don't think it will be a problem. DSL is capped at 756Kb/s upload. You need to find a good mix of low resolution, high compression and frame rate that will work. Maybe 320x240, using h.264 compression at 12 frames per second would consume most of a maxium speed DSL. Here's the Axis bandwidth calculator that may help. http://www.axis.com/products/video/design_tool/calculator.htm You can use FTP on some camera to send video but keep in mind that these cameras have limited buffers so while it's FTP'ing, it may not take on new events. ACTi, Dahua, Mobotix, Panasonic, AVTech, Brickcom can FTP video remotely. Axis can on some cameras that have their edge storage feature. Realistically, you may want to store the videos on a local SD card, then use the limited bandwidth you have to view one camera at a time.

Don't know if you tried, but how responsive are they to adding support for new cameras? For example, if I had a Dahua and asked them to help support it, will they ignore me or help? An i7 certainly is a powerful processor. Maybe I can upgrade the i3 to an i5 or i7 on the same motherboard, just never looked into it. Don't know what is going on with SSD but the prices dropped dramatically with 128GB SSD's for about $68 at Newegg now and buy.com has a Sandisk 240GB SSD for $154 today.

That may just be in the UK. I have not heard of people getting turned down or being asked to pay for support. For example, they won't replace or repair my M1011 that has a fried sensor because they know the camera is over 1 year old and out of warranty but they still respond to questions, they still are helpful, just won't RMA the camera. What people sell on ebay is anyone's guess. I'm sure stolen goods are sold on eBay without anyone knowing. It's like anything else, buyer beware. If it's used equipment, it could be out of warranty and if it's refurb it's probably not warrantied by Axis. What I find on eBay occassionally is an integrator that bought a large lot from Axis to get special bid pricing and then had extra cameras and decided to dump them on eBay. So I searched Axis contracts as I'm an authorized Axis partner. Given their rules below, any camera that is advertised below MSRP violates their partnership rules, any reseller selling exclusively on the web violates their rules. B&H therefore is not a good partner because they advertise below MSRP but has a brick and mortar store so it's not exclusive but maybe sells enough so Axis looks the other way, maybe they don't even look, who knows. A reseller does not have to be an Axis partner to buy or sell Axis cameras, only to get partner benefits. I can find no place that says that they won't warranty a product they manufacture because you didn't buy it from a partner. •Partner will not exclusively sell Axis products on the Worldwide Web. •In order to receive any benefits of being an Axis Partner, the Partner agrees not to advertise any Axis branded/sourced product on the Worldwide Web below MSRP. So it's up to you, are you feeling lucky? Like I said before, I would find the lowest seller that appears legit.

Many of the cheap lenses you may be buying are not made for the larger sensor on the Dahua camera which I believe is 1/3" sensor, but your cheaper lens may be for VGA resolution and 1/4" sensor. The lens on the Dahua, since it's a day only camera has the IR cut filter coating right on the lens as you've already figured out. The lens you are buying are generic, so they assume the camera will have a mechanical IR cut filter or it will be a night only camera like Foscams and such. Best bet is to contact the Dahua dealer you bought from and see if you can buy lenses from them. Also, that may work better at night as you can use the new lens with IR illuminators. If the color bothers you, just switch the camera to b&w night mode.

What does "unauthorized web dealers" mean? For example, if I buy Axis cameras from my "authorized" Axis distributor, say Anixster and I resell them on a webite, is that authorized or unauthorized? Axis didn't authorize me to do it, but I bought from an authorized distributor as a reseller with the intent to resell. Since Axis uses distibutors, how do they even know who buys their cameras? I never signed any agreement that says what methods I can use or not use to sell them. It's like Best Buy goes to Ingram Micro, an authorized distributor of HP products and buys 1,000 HP printers. HP has no knowledge of who the 1,000 printers got sold to as Ingram Micro does not report this back to HP and Best Buy does not report back to Ingram Micro who they sold the 1,000 printers to and part of those 1,000 customer may have bought it as a gift and wasn't for their use or even resold on the internet.

You can get Bosch motion detectors that work pretty well for $20-40 and hook up to the alarm inputs on your camera and then set events to trigger off the alarm input instead of video motion detect. Analytics software like VitaminD would be great, but they do consume a huge amount of CPU power to do this, so make sure you have an adequate sized supercomputer Mike, how many cameras do you have on a VitaminD PC and what's the PC configuration. I always like the thought of using VitaminD, just wasn't sure my i3 PC I currently use can handle six 1-2MP cameras.

I agree with Mike, you will not have any support issues with Axis, buy it as cheap as you can. Dahua support is pretty close to zero. If you buy from the right reseller that can support you, that may be worth a few extra bucks.

Looks like pretty good prices for the Axis cameras and he has a 100% positive feedback, I would do it. It's barely early morning in China now, give it time. As for your driveway. Here's the deal, you have an angle of about 70-90 degrees, that's a extra wide angle lens, maybe a 3mm. Look at my driveway with the Dahua 1080P camera in my blog. The angle works almost right with 3.3mm, the widest that camera can do but you won't get facial recognition at that focal lenth at that distance. To get facial recognition, you need someone's face to be 80-90 pixels tall and I was able to get about 85 pixel size face at about 28' with the lens set to about 5mm, but doing so would not cover an area as wide as what I covered, frankly, it covered just the width of my driveway. For example, in my rear yard where an intruder is more likely to come from, I have 2 cameras to give me the pixel density, 2 viewing angles and coverage I need. So you have three choices, more resolution, PTZ or more cameras. If you go with a 3MP Dahua, the width of the image remains the same, 2048 pixels as the 1080P, but you pick up 50% more pixels vertically, but that lets you see 50% more area covered for the same focal length, the face would still be the same number of pixels tall. This is because one camera is 16:9 aspect ratio the other 4:3. Go to 5MP, and you'll have what you want, but you'll get much lower frame rate and probably much lower low light capability. PTZ to me is the worst choice. First you divide the time the camera see's an area by the number of areas you want to track. For example, if you want it to scan 3 areas, each area would only get 20 seconds per minute of viewing time. If you had a huge area to cover, it may make sense, but if you can have 2 or 3 cameras cover the entire area, it may be the same price as the PTZ, but each covers its area 100% of the time. To me, buying a cheap PTZ is risky because of the all the moving parts that can go wrong.

There are LPR specific cameras that are high contrast camera, many times just B&W sensors and have very good low light capabiliy and faster shutter speed at night for high speed license plate capture. To get a proper one, one that can see a plate clearly at 50-60 mph is not cheap. You would typically have software on a PC that's OCR software for license plate recognition that analyzes the image, converts it to text and matches it up to a list and then acts on that list. The software may send an alert, may be able to trigger a gate to open. Lately a new class of LPR cameras have evolved called ALPR. These have the processing capabilities in the camera to read the plate and process the information as an event, much in the same way you have motion events. The event can trigger an alarm output say to trigger a parking garage or street gate to open if the license plate matches a list of residents or sending out an email or text if a unauthorized car entered, maybe by tailgating. At ISC West earlier this year, one vendor demo'ed an ALPR camera that outputted text license plate numbers at amazing speed. He put like 8 plates on a drum and spun it as fast as he could and the camera captured every single plate number. I believe they rated the camera to capable of capturing a license plate at 190 mph. But that may be overkill if all you want to do is record video of cars going by and have enough qualiy to be able to see the plate number in the image. If that's the case, look for cameras that have very good WDR capabilities and very good low light capabilities and really good contrast.

It's a given that in order to see a plate number, you would have to have adequate focal length to fill the frame as much as possible with a plate. I've tried two cameras, one without WDR, the ACTi TCM-7811, can't see plate numbers at night, the KCM-5611 with WDR (or ExDR as they call it) can see plate numbers so camera choice is important just to be able to see a plate at night. But the question still exists to the OP, does he want the camera see plate numbers or read plate numbers?

What NVR software works well with Dahua cameras? I've tested with BlueIris and it works pretty well. I know some people have been trying to get it to work with Zoneminder, but have not seen anything definitive there.

Yes, if you can because what's the point of LPR if the camera or software doesn't convert the license plate to text so it can be compared to a list. Or does he just want a camera where you can ID the license plate as that's different for me. Just a good WDR camera will work. The biggest problem is at night with cameras that have built in illuminators where it reflects of the reflective license plate and all you see is a white rectangle. BTW, the OP said "READ PLATES". To me that's not taking a picture of a plate, but actually read the plate. I'm actually looking for an ALPR camera that can "READ PLATES" and feed it into an access control system to log plates. Reading involves comprehension, otherwise you would look at plates, not read them.

It depends on how long the driveway is and if you want have facial recognition. For example, with a 1080P camera at 28-30 which is how far it is from my camera at my eave to the sidewalk, I can get facial recognition with a 5mm lens. Wider than that makes for a pretty picture, but someone would have to enter my driveway for me to recognize them. Of course with shorter driveway, you can use a wider lens. As for where to buy Axis, I've purchased from PCRush in LA for a decent price. Even buying wholesale from my distributors doesn't get me much better pricing. From my experience, Axis is liberal on their support. Even camera purchased through OEM that they didn't need to support they did anyway. So get the best price you can. Amazon and B&H are also good sources. As for Dahua, there's on guy on ebay, kkmets1986 , name is Kyle that carries a few models under the Dahua name. There's a couple on the internet that sell under their own brand name and model numbers. My advice is to send an email to Dahua and ask them. Their emai address is overseas@dahuatech.com PS. A 8 camera NVR from Dahua is about $325, supports multiple brands of cameras, may be a better value than buying a PC and software separately, don't know, haven't tried it but worth looking into.

With LPR, having a lot of megapixels will work against you as OCR software may not be able to keep up. You need a very focused telephoto lens in the area where the plate will pass through, not the scenery or the entire car. You can have a separate general purpose camera for the shot of the car. The camera should be very high contrast, B&W camera for this purpose. For high speed capture with the OCR built in, you may be looking at $2-3K from what I've seen.

How are you recording? Straight from camera to SD or via FTP, or an NVR? What brands? I've seen the opposite where it's smooth when played through the NVR software and then exported video is jumpy.

The Axis P5534-e is a nice PTZ camera, good low light performance, probably eat up most of your budget at about $2,500). The Dahua's are good for the money, about $350 for their 1080P cameras with IR illuminators built in (dome or bullet). The Dahua NVR which is pretty cheap, about $400ish does support Axis camera, so may be worth considering. I'm trying to get my hands on one to do a review for my blog. ACTi is supposed to have their 1080P PTZ camera out soon. I expect it to be in under $2k. Don't know why PM doesn't work for you. I've received PM's in the past few days. Maybe it's restricted to new members for a period of time or posts, just my guess.

What's your budget for the whole system or per camera? Decent outdoor cameras with illuminators start in the $300 range but can easily go to $500-800 and up.

I got the camera to play on PSS but not able to record in it of itself or view recordings from the FTP server.