buellwinkle

Sure, but with financing and a few hundred down, he can get a pretty decent PTZ.

Not necessarily. PTZ cameras can have presets and a patrol can be create to stop at key areas. Also, some brands allow for HTML commands to be sent, meaning if you have say a 180 degree camera looking over a wide area or a series of fixed cameras, if there's motion detect, the camera can send an URL command to a PTZ camera to pan/tilt to that area and zoom in for a close up recording. I was thinking about an PTZ camera for a park that would do a patrol of key areas where there's trouble and not necessarily practical to put a few fixed cameras. ACTi is coming out with a nice PTZ in Jan/Feb timeframe, 1080P, 10x zoom, standard PoE, about the size of a regular 4" fixed dome and in the $900 price range from what they showed at ASIS.

It's very hard to spec how much space any camera will take because you don't now how many events will happen, what frame rate is acceptable, what quality is acceptable. We have one 3MP camera with a 64GB card in a remote location where we can't get a link to and it holds at least two weeks worth of recordings.

Increase the switch time, looks like it's switching 1 per second, change it to 10-20 seconds which is common in other cameras. It's in the image menu. Also change sensitivity to low, that may help, normal is the default.

I did notice that the new version uses more memory than before, wasn't aware of the leak with Milestone Mobile, just thought it was a 32-bit to 64-bit issue since the old version was 32-bit and the new one is 64-bit so I had to re-install Windows. I went from 2GB to 4GB RAM and that cleared that up. Also noticed that it takes a bit longer for Smart Client to connect than it did before. Look forward to that software update. I've worked for many software companies and to me it's just the norm to discover a bunch of issues when a release comes out and then send out an update in about 30 days. Did you see my Milestone 2013 review, I published it this morning.

For larger homes, you can put in Ubiquiti UniFi repeaters. They are inexpensive and help extend WiFi network throughout the house. If you have all UniFi equipment, it seamless transfers connections to the one with the best signal, so you can walk around the house with a phone or tablet on WiFi and you'll always have the best signal, very cool. I agree with ak357 for powerline adapters, its what I use in one home where I couldn't hard wire a camera, ironically in the same room as the WiFi router. I use a wall plug type injector with it that plugged into the powerline adapter that had an outlet in it.

PoE is a generic term, can mean anything, for example, Ubiquiti sells PoE switches that are 24v were most PoE switches are 48v. The typical standard we talk about here is the 802.3af and class distinguishes power, most common is Class 3 which is 15.4W at the switch (12.95W at the camera). There are some cameras like PTZ that exceed this, for example, an Axis Q6035-E requires 60W so they include a 75W PoE injector in the box.

Get the Hikvision DS-2CD2732F-I, $239, is varifocal 2.8 to 12mm, audio I believe and 3-axis dome, SD card slot, alarm I/O. Not too bad for the price. PM me if you want to know where to get them.

My best suggestion is to take one of the free online Mandarin classes and learn how to read Mandarin. Dahua NVR's are very sensitive to getting bricked if you use the wrong firmware.

Pretty cool or maybe the same one but without the card reader - http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/vto5110b-322.html#pic2

For us, we needed an Axis T90A42 illuminator

They don't show it on their site but they do make one and I can probably get it from my resource. Is it the one with the built in IR LEDs?

The only PTZ cameras I know if with IR LEDs are the Dahua and Hikvision. Have sold several of these, they work very well (comes in 720P, 1080P, 3MP, not a huge price difference between the 3) - http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/sd698282a-hn-33.html Here's the Hikvision, more expensive than Dahua but they are better at support and service - http://www.hikvision.com/en/us/Products_show.asp?id=7684 If you are down to the $250-400 price range, I would recommend an ACTi E72 fixed vandal dome, 3MP, 3-axis, well made, good support and warranty.

Mobotix has been promising this for years and hasn't delivered yet on a recording fallback to SD. As for cheap cameras, why not. For example, Hikvision and Dahua camera with SD card slots can record and playback from the camera. You can set it to record and that's independent of what your NVR software is doing to capture the video. The only issue is you would have to get to the SD card before it's overwritten. For example, say at 2AM you network fails, the camera is still recording to SD, at 9AM you notice this happened and fix it, but the camera is still recording to the SD card, overwriting as it fills up. There's a race to get to the SD card to copy the recordings off before they get overwritten. It may be possible if you have a local PC to monitor this, you can write a script to check the network, if it's down, send commands to the camera to start recording and then stop when the network comes back up.

Before you get too deep into this, the least expensive decent camera I know if $599, a 3X optical zoom Dahua, 1080P. ACTi is coming out some very inexpensive small PoE PTZ cameras with 10x zoom about February which I'm expecting will sell for about $800-900. Do you need IR illuminators built in or do you have plenty of light at night. With IR illuminators, Dahua makes a 720P and 1080P with 20x optical zoom, figure about $1,200-1,500 range. Now if you want something more robust it's going to cost way more. As for controlling the PTZ, usually you setup presets and an automated patrol of each preset. There will be on-screen controls via the web browser to work the camera manually. If this is just a science experiment, just to see how PTZ's work but you don't care about image quality or how long the camera will last, the Agasio PTZ, vga resolution, 3x optical zoom is $179 last time I checked.

All the same, can last for years, can break at any moment. if you want total reliability, get Mobotix.

Maybe resetting the camera will clear that up.

15000 sounds about right for MJPEG but way overkill for h.264 encoding as most newer cameras support. I typically set my 2MP cameras at 4096.

The manual says 16 seconds or longer.

The 850nm is way brighter than the 940nm, more than I expected. looking from the Camera that can see both strips(picture link ending with B4F) actually glowing, the 940nm is on the left, the 840nm on the right

Wasn't paying attention to that but for a bullet, it has a lot of IR bleed, certainly worth fixing. I don't see the limit IR coverage and may appear that way because the black asphalt driveway and darker car absorb light more than the pathway. But like I said, no matter what you do, you cannot identify a face that's 35 pixels tall even in full daylight. You need to get the subject to come closer to that camera, maybe put a sign that says "stand here". It's the biggest problem I see with DIY security, they go for the wide shot because they get great coverage but then fail to get the pixel density to be useful. I would get a 6mm 3MP camera just for the driveway and one just for the walkway.

Tougher to measure horizontal unless the subject is facing directly forward. In this case, the best image was probably a profile shot and you can't apply the same rules.

If you can get the subject to stop closer to the camera or used a longer lens. Rule of thumb is the face should be at least 80 pixels tall to be identifiable and when you add noise at night, it should even be larger. The subjects face in your video is about 35-37 pixels tall which is worthless anytime of day. So you have two choices, get a narrower lens, maybe a 6mm lens, or increase your resolution to 5MP or a combination of both. For my driveway, I use 3MP camera because it gives me 50% more vertical pixels and I use a narrower lens, 4.2mm vs 3.6mm you are using.

At the ASIS show last month they had that camera mounted in a fake ATM and all you saw from the face of the ATM was a small hole, maybe 1/16" round, amazing. But you do need the box that comes with it's cable.

When the camera is plugged into network and it does not detect any DHCP services, it will automatically assign itself a default IP: 192.168.0.100 is what it says in current ACTi manuals but that camera is a fairly old model so it's possible it worked differently back then. How are you powering the camera, PoE switch or PoE injector? Is it new and do other cameras work with it? Can you see if there's any lights inside the camera that come on when you power it up. Sometimes there's a hidden LED that you can see if you take the dome cover off.