buellwinkle

Owl boy, when I was at ISC back in March I believe, there were a few companies offering 1080P analog cameras and DVRs using coax (not IP cameras) which amazes me as I didn't think Coax was suitabe for HD and you would use something digital like HDMI, DVI or even component video cables. Here's one company that makes an HD DVR and HD 1080P analog cameras. I guess the appeal is that you can use existing coax cabling. http://www.123securityproducts.com/downloads/dl/file/id/4104/everfocus_hd_spec_sheet.pdf

What resolution are you comparing cameras at? You can get HD resolution from analog cameras and you can get D1/VGA resolution from IP cameras. For example, you can create a system using $50 IP cameras, free software, small PC as an NVR and have a much more cost effective solution than an inexpensive analog system and probably get comparable quality. You can also get an HD analog system that will probably have comparable costs to a similar resolution IP solution. There are $600 analog cameras, there are $600 IP cameras as much as there are $50 analog cameras and $50 IP cameras. It's tough when you walk into Costco and walk out with an 8 camera analog system, DVR and all for $499 and think you got a deal. Probably the same sense of accomplishment someone gets when they go on eBay and find 8 IP cameras for $300, each with pan/tilt capabilities, each with IR illuminators built in and run free NVR software on a re-purposed old computer and laugh at the Costco deal for being so expensive.

Here's what I know about doing business with companies in mainland China. Friday is there Saturday, so don't expect a response until Sunday night. I'm on the left coast, so my 6PM is their morning, so I email them around 8PM because by then, they cleared out their overnight email and they get mine fresh, not part of a stack of emails they hurry through. They rarely will call because it's easier to send emails, less issues with accents, so expect a back and forth email dialoge that can last days. Many have Skype, if you can contact them on Skype, that would be best. Expect to get answers for questions you never asked and never really answer your question.

I've yet to see a camera not allow you to set any valid IP address or use DHCP to get one from a router. Each camera has it's quirks, for example, with ACTi, you set the IP, but then you have to click on save & reboot for it take and if you go to another menu before you do that, it loses that setting. Also, do you have multiple DHCP servers on your network? Some people will buy two routers inadvertently, for example, the cable modem is a router, and they add a WiFi router to that and they end up with two DHCP servers if they don't realize they have to turn one off. Also, try just using the switch not attached to anything other than your PC and the camera and setup fixed IP's for both on the same subnet and see if that works. At least that takes any router out of the picture until you setup the camera.

That camera has the best IR illuminator effective range in the ACTi' lineup, 40m, you should see it light up the car pretty well so something could be physicaly wrong with the camera. Setup remote access and call ACTi and have them connect to your camera at night and look at it, may be an RMA.

If you are starting a list, I know for a fact it works on the TCM-7811.

Actually the spec sheet does not say that, but they should clean up their website.

Nobody does it as good as Mobotix, they are the king, but Axis comes pretty darn close with it's Axis free Camera Companion software. It's PC software that manages the recordings the camera makes either to SD or to a NAS. So the cameras do the recording, but the software makes it look like you have an NVR. Not through the web browser like Mobotix allows, more like Mobotix MX ControlCenter software if you are familiar with that but easier to use. I'm going to do a review on that when the new P33 dome comes out next month. Sort of kill two birds with one stone.

First, load the lastest firmware as there has been many enhancements made to the light metering. It came out about a week or two ago. It will make your daytime images much better. Just go to http://www.acti.com, log in (or register if you haven't), go to support and product support matrix, find the camera and click on firmware button. Then unzip the file and load the firmware in the camera from the setup menus. Second, there's no IR light bleed on these cameras as it's not a traditional old school LED ring around the lens with a foam or rubber donut to seperate the lens from the LED ring. The IR LED's are embedded in pockets in the plastic. Same design that Axis seems to be using in their new P33 out next month. It appears as there may be a light source that's too close to the camera causing reflections against the dome or like previously said, there's dirt on the lens or dome. Is the dome facing down or facing out. If it's facing out, it maybe getting reflection from the street light. I have mine under an eave that shades the dome from the street light reflection. Not as much an issue on a bullet camera. As for noise, there's two schools of thought. There's those that hate noise and buy cameras with noise reduction but at the expense of detail. There's people like me that embrace the noise as I rather have the detail and can de-noise the image later in photoshop which has more finese at de-noising that most built in de-noising in cameras. But you should not have a lot of noise, for example, I would say the noise difference between their ACTi 1231 bullet cameras and the 7811 is maybe 1/2 to 1/4 the noise but certainly not noise free.

Ray Wu does have the coolest holiday lights.

If we are talking small in-expensive bullets, check out the ACTi TCM-1111, under $300 similar specs to the Dahua but ACTi provides software free and a U.S. office for service and support.

Try the Mobotix S14, very discrete, two seperate lenses. The B&W lenses have the best low light images I've ever seen.

Like this in front of my house? Works fine, most domes are 3-axis, meaning you can point them anywhere you want and tilt the lens to level it

A decent IR illuminator for that area would cost about $500-800 but then you can use an simple $200ish camera like the Dahua.

It was not posted through CCTV forum, it was posted with postimage.org and mine is large than that, save it, see.

He had to have provided that size image, look at mine, it's full size, bigger than his image.

I ran into this free service that looked interesting - http://www.postimage.org/ No registration required, just upload your image, click on the direct link button and then come here, click on the IMG button and paste link in. I used this old picture I had, 1.1MB. Click to see full size

Sure, but still, you are looking at a bunch of file names, so it's semantics as to wether you save it first and then play or just play it on your PC using the browser, it still has to come to your PC to play. A simple 20 second video can be 20-40MB file, takes time to start playing that video. You still have no easy way to look at thumbnails or timelines to see what was recorded. Wait until you are staring a list of hundreds of file names and you spend hours of looking at videos of squirrels, birds and shadows looking for that one nugget you want.

On the NVR software and cameras I use, I have it display one stream but record another. For example, I have it display VGA resolution to save bandwidth for remote viewing but it records a stream with megapixel resolution. On my older single stream cameras it displays and records the same stream.

The only company I know of that do that well, if you want to be able to do on camera recording or NAS recording and have it be like an NVR where you can look at a timeline or thumbnails and click and play video directly from the camera is Mobotix. Axis has free software called Camera Companion that works with certain models allows you have the camera record to SD and then use their IOS, Android or PC app to act like an NVR viewer. So the cameras do all the work, but the software makes viewing the cameras and recorded video easy like any NVR. This is their answer to Mobotix and their MXControlCenter. Since the software is more like a viewer, you only need to run it when you want to look at the cameras or recording, it's not a traditional NVR that has to run 24/7. Axis folk gave me a nice demo, and it does work very nicely and they want me to do a review but none of my Axis cameras I have are supportted and I'm on vacation a good part of July but I'll do a review in August when their new P33 dome comes out with the IR leds. Vivotek would be similar to ACTi in how it works. You can see my review on one of them in my blog and I have screen shots of the menus related to this. Being able to record to SD or a networked mount point does not mean that it will be easy to manage like Mobotix, Axis Camera Companion or decent NVR software. Both Vivotek and ACTi provide free NVR software. I use the ACTi software and their latest version is amazingly good.

I have a review on a similar model IQEye Alliance Pro dome on my blog so you can see. It's not PTZ though, if that's what you need. A decent HD PTZ dome could set you back a few thousand dollars. All you really need is a nice dome mounted under the eave that covers the front of your home and all name brand decent 1-3MP domes will cost in that $500-700 price range. Higher resolutions sounds cool, but in real practice, the higher the megapixels, the tougher it is to get them to work in low light. This is because as pixel density increases, pixel size decreases and it can capture less light. Sort of a generality, but I've yet to see 3-5MP cameras that do really well in low light. I use an ACTi TCM-7811 dome in front of my house and works well day or night. One nice thing about ACTi is they provide the NVR recording software for free and it's really good.

I've never seen a ptz speed dome with IR emmitters or even heard of built in emmitters good for 100m and for $810 it appears to do what you want, heck 100m IR light from RayTec is going to cost you that much alone. If you can post a video clip at night with the effectiveness of the camera, that would be great. There's two videos on youtube now but hard to say what it is. Seems real dark and then gets brighter as it zooms in, sort of odd. Like the IR LED is such a fine pinpoint spot that it doesn't work at all at wide angle, but does work when zoomed in. You have to question one thing, the spec says 15W is used for the IR LEDs, can you really light 100m away with just 15W of LED? Also, Dahua has NVR software for this, why look anywhere else - http://www.dahuasecurity.com/English/product_info.aspx?type=303&&css=7&&id=62

ACTi release a few cameras with SD card slots but no firmware to support it. The 7811 is one of them. So now they support it, although it the first version so there could be issues. I'll play around more with when I have time. I just did a quick test and it worked, but no real life day to day recordings. It's a pain because you have a list of files that were recorded, but the ony way to view them is to download them off the camera and play them with their viewer utility. So certainly not a replacement for an NVR, at least not in this release. Axis does have it's Camera Companion software that gives you an NVR solution using the video recorded on the SD card.

I have two names, I know, I'm a greedy bastard. One is for my main house (6+ cameras), one is for our summer home (5 cameras). Also, only have one device in your entire location update DDNS. For example, if your router supports it, that's the first choice, if that doesn't then just have 1 camera do it, not every camera, every PC. All it does is send an update to dyndns when your WAN ip address changes. Actually this is my #1 blog post article on my blog, gets about 600 page views a week.

Ahh, cheap stuff, I understand. You have to ask them what software works with it as most software will not be support the cameras directly. Maybe via Onvif, but that's a lowest common denominator interface, it may not work as well as you expect. What works well with cheap stuff is Zoneminder as you can use just give it the url for the video stream and it can process it. Since Zoneminder is open source, you have the support of the community and it's free. Also, keep in mind, generic support with generic software typically means the PC has to do all the motion detection and 24 cameras could require a serious server or maybe a few cheaper consumer grade PCs, say 3 of them with 8 cameras each or 2 with 12 cameras each.