buellwinkle

Mobotix D14-180 would give you 6MP total resolution in a wide format at a reasonable price. You won't be able to ID a face futher than maybe 15-20'. You are better off with a 1080P PTZ speed dome like an Axis Q6035-E and have it go on patrol to cover various areas. At least with a 20X zoom, you can ID a face few hundred feet away. I'm wrapping up my review on the Axis Q6035-E this week for sure. As for Stardot, check this out different times of day - http://mountaininfo.com/arrowheadcamera.html It's in a parking lot with adequate lighting. Here you'll be able to see how well the Stardot Netcam XL's work at night under similar conditions, which is not so great.

I have a review on my blog on the M12 and should have a review very soon on the Q6035-E. We had a defective dome that we replaced and just waiting to wrap up the day and night videos. The M12 is only 1.2MP at night, has a slow frame rate, I believe 4fps at it's highest resolution, sort of an older camera that Mobotix will replace with the M14 this summer. Also, the lenses are glued in place. The D14 would be a far better choice as it's the new model, has faster frame rates, h.264 and such and you can change the sensor/lenses are field changable. List is $1,600 with lenses. The Q6035-E is 1080P at 30fps, and is a speed dome that works very well. Very good image quality day and night. List is $4,500 with midspan. So the question must be, for the same cost, should you get three M12's or one Q60? That depends on what you are trying to do? If you need 360 degree coverage you can do that with 3 M12's or one Q60, if you need to be able to zoom in and possibly do motion tracking, faster frame rate the Q60 is the better choice.

Doesn't say which model cameras, what exposure settings so its a typical vendor test to show that they have the best camera.

For cameras that use 12V, is it possible to power the camera via the ethernet cable. I was looking at this from Vivotek that I'm assuming gets 12V from a power source, and ethernet, feeds them across a ethernet cable to the camera and then splits it back out so you have ethernet and 12V seperate. I believe Vivotek sells these to sort of emulate PoE for it's non-PoE cameras. http://www.eyespypro.com/products/Vivotek-12V-PoE-Kit-Injector-and-Splitter.html If this is the case, can it power a camera that say uses 11W of power at 12V?

My thoughts on refurbs are that maybe the product has intermittent problems, the person sent it for warranty repair, they gave him a new unit, did a benchtest on the old one, tested fine but later has intermittent problems. I can tell you that a lot of WiFi equipment dies slowly, first droppping connections occasionally, then more as it dies. I bought a Phillips 23" TV from Phillips as a refurb. How can you go wrong, the TV was checked out by the manufacturer. But it was one of those intermittent problems where it worked for a few hours and then overheated and shut off, nothing they can test in a quick 5 minute test process. Phillips wanted me to ship it back at my costs, then send me a another refurb a few weeks later. So for $50, I would get another $199 TV. So I bought a new one, swapped the rear panel that had the serial number and returned it to a local store. Now some sucker will get 10% off on an open box buy which is really a refurb that worked occasionally. Don't be that sucker. So now you know why I only by new stuff in sealed boxes

Wrapped up my review of the ACTi TCM-7811. I reviewed this camera because it uses a CCD sensor instead of CMOS like most IP cameras. CCDs tend to have better low light capability and the Sony EXView HAD CCD sensor is one of the good ones. http://ipcamnetwork.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/acti-tcm-7811-nightt/ Now that this review is out of the way, the Axis Q6035-E is next. For those waiting for that review, the plastic dome was damaged in shipping and it arrived on Friday and ready to start working on that review.

Still don't understand what you are trying to do. Is the camera that you are trying to connect not a WiFi camera? If so, then the refurb Netgear adapter should work, albeit refurb sends a red flag to me. You have two routers, are they both on seperate internet connections on seperate ISPs? Is one plugged into the other? Are they both WiFi? If they are WiFi, are you having signal issues?

There's no such thing really as an authorized dealer/store/reseller, maybe there are authorized distributors. Could be those sites are selling gray market products, comperable to the way photo cameras have been sold for years as some of these products are available in other countries for less money. They buy them there wholesale, like in Tapei and import them into the U.S. but with their own warranty. Not sure if this is the case but places like Gemini and Surveillent have prices that are very close and sometimes below wholesale and always wondered how they can do it. Even at PCRush, I've bought Axis cameras retail from them that were actually lower than Axis silver level partner prices from distributors but never had a warranty issue and I got support from Axis. I once thought about selling cameras online but didn't now how to compete against these, afterall, can't make money selling products below cost. If there's interest on some cameras, I can try and coordinate group buys through my distributor if he's up for it.

Yes, the daytime exposure is not as accurate as I would like it, certainly not like their other products. They recognize this as a bug and are working on it. As for buying one. I use Google Shopping by entering the model number, and select shopping from the More drop down on Google.com. Places I bought from in the past that I trust are PCRush.com, B&H Photo Video, Amazon.

I provide real live images and started including video on my blog, not as clear and pretty as what manufacturers put up on youtube but closer to what you'll get. When it comes to low light, you may get an image from any camera, not sure it will be a crisp image with decent contrast though.

Can't comment on the Sony camera, but as for the Sony "Exmor" CMOS sensor, you can see my review on the Brickcom WOB-130Np on my blog, it uses this sensor. I found it to be quite good, maybe not as good as the Sony EXview HAD CCD chip in low light, but pretty decent. The Brickcom cost slightly more than the Sony, but that's comparing a bullet to a box camera, so not completely fair.

Consider camera with 60fps if you want to catch a slight of hand type cheating. Keep in mind you need very good low light capability because you can't get even 30fps if you need a 1/15th exposure to do it.

That's great that he has DSL, because that means that the local phone company has circuits in the area. Ask the local phone company if they can put in a local digital loop to his location to some local ISPs. Then search around for an ISP that can sell you a partial D3 circuit with enough bandwidth to support the transfer. You don't need it to stream all cameras, just copy the events over, so it's a throughput issue, for example, if you can push 10GB in a 24 hour period, but generate 20GB of data, that won't work. The ISP can guide you as the what bridges/switches they will work with. Then you need to find a disaster recovery site that will host the server to store the recorded video, hopefully outside Florida. I just hope the customer's wallet is bigger than his ideas

If you are looking for value, bang for the buck, my guess is you will select from one of the brands in Taiwan (ACTi, Brickcom, Geovision, Messoa, OpenEye, Speco, Vivotek...) . The main differences between the companies from my point of view is consistent quality, quick RMA process, good support, basically a company stands by their product. To me this is the biggest differentiator. The next is how stable is the software/firmware, not all are equal here. Not saying that cameras don't have bugs, it's how many, how quick will they fix bugs. It's a totally different ballgame compared to analog cameras, bad software is a deal breaker for me. Also, if you are used to analog cameras, going to MP cameras means going from CCD to CMOS (although there are a small handful of CCD MP cameras). That means low light performance varies greatly between camera models, so keep that in mind. I have reviews on popular cameras on my blog and putting up new ones as fast as I can write them. Always looking for camera recommendations from the community so I can get them to review.

I like the idea of VitaminD, but it's limited to 1.3MP resolution. Not a big deal for me as all my cameras are 1.3MP but someday I may want more. I would imagine the limitation is their ability to process that many bits, don't know.

No problem, I'll reach out to them first of the week They are 5 miles from my house and said they would lend me cameras for reviews a few weeks ago.

Looks like a sensor defect to me. If the line was white, on a dome, I may chalk it to glare, but this is black, means pixels are dead on the sensor. Axis works slowly at times but they do work on issues and they do get them fixed.

I've used powerline adapters, they work well. Their downside is you can't use a UPS or power strip and my cameras are all on UPS. What brand of IP cameras are you using? Because really cheap Chinese cameras tend to have lousy WiFi radios that drop signal even when a room or two away from the router. I've used low end Axis WiFi cameras (M1011-W and M1031-W) in the same situations without any WiFi issues in 2 years in a vacation home where I don't have the luxury of resetting the camera if the WiFi connection gets hosed.

The OP has ACTi cams, but you can use any camera as long as it's made by ACTi. That's how vendors lock you in with their free software. Decent NVR software for 6 cams can cost several hundred dollars at minimum. I use other brands of cameras like Axis, but at other locations without an NVR.

If there's interest, I can review IQEye next. The only thing I don't like about that model is that it's a box camera, requires an housing to make it usable outdoors. Do you know a comparable model that's an outdoor dome or bullet with the same capabilities?

The $595 is from Surveillent through Amazon and they seem to have the best prices, but don't know anyone that has bought from them. We used an Extreme UF500 illuminator, uses a quartz halogen bulb, with the Mobotix D12, 2 b&w sensors. Nice but pricey. I just like the Mobotix solution for this case because they have a small number of cameras, and not having an NVR makes it price competitive. I can send you night images from both, so you can see, send me your email via PM. I'll publish a review soon on my blog, but trying to work out some video conversion issues, because when I post it on youtube it's not smooth, but on my computer it's fine.

I use ACTi's free NVR Enterprise software. Works well, uses very little CPU (was running 6 cameras, all 1.3MP on an Atom processor NetTop and it was running 10-20% busy). I moved it to an i3 I got cheap on ebay, maybe overkill with two 1TB drives, but works nicely. Along side this, they provide a free IOS app (iPhone/iPad). When I want to look at the cameras from my Android phone, I use IP Cam Viewer, free with ads, or pay a few bucks for the pro version. Their new (free) software they demo'ed to me at ISC looks amazingly good and slick, it should be out in a few weeks, mid May timeframe. I tried BlueIris, had it for maybe a year, CPU hog was my #1 complaint. Has some nice features and it's cheap, $49, but that's $49 more than the ACTi software which is better.

Check out the ACTi TCM-7811. I'm currently working on a review for my blog. It uses a CCD instead of CMOS like most IP cameras and has IR illuminators built in with a rated effectiveness of 40 meters. The only other camera that I have worked with that has comperable low light capability are Mobotix with b&w sensors, same resolution, b&w day or night and no built in illumination but I use a Extreme 100' quartz light with it.

The new one he has does have an IR cut filter but maybe it records in color while the IR filter is off like the old Foscams. Actually the images quality looks far improved over the older Foscams.

I had the similar camera once, the 3MP version, and once you put a lens on it, it would be tough to put in a dome. Maybe a 7" dome, the kind the sell on eBay something like this - http://www.ebay.com/itm/7-Outdoor-Dome-Encloser-For-FosCam-Wireless-IP-Camera-/320518172496?pt=PCC_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item4aa05f2f50