Soundy

Decent... but not fantastic with the harsh lighting involved. I think for this particular customer at least, these cameras will be better-suited if they need higher res in well-lit areas... unfortunately the areas they really want MP are in the public areas, which are all dark at night; all the good lighting is reserved for back-of-house where they aren't really concerned about the resolution. However, we are adding this to our arsenal, and should the need arise for better detail back-of-house, I think it will be the first choice.

the idea with something like Plexi-Clean is that the antistatic properties help prevent the dust buildup in the first place - better to not have to wipe it at all (or at least, much less frequently).

Gave ya a little plug: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30770&p=192705#p192705

These Areconts should be decent in low-light: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=30313

I have one client that has a lot of issues with low light as well... we've been using a couple models of 3xLogic 2MP cameras that work fairly well while staying in color: Over the next while, I'll be testing a few others on one of their sites, including Axis, Vivotek, Panasonic, and maybe a Pelco as well. I recently replaced an Arecont on another of their sites with a Vivotek and was quite impressed with the results: NIGHT: Arecont BEFORE: Vivotek AFTER: DAY: Arecont BEFORE: Vivotek AFTER: The downside is that none of these come particularly cheap: MSRP on these START at around $800... the Vivotek street price breaks four digits, I think.

Integrated is fine, even the VMS. It's just doing basic DirectDraw rendering, no 3D or anything fancy.

Where does one even FIND 380TVL CMOS cameras anymore??? It would be helpful to know just what the budget is... you're concerned with individual image quality rather than framerate, but that's all controlled at the DVR - image quality starts at the camera. If you don't have a good camera to produce the best picture possible right from the get-go, there's no way you'll end up with good results downstream.

Sounds like extreme overkill to me... although it should last a long time without needing an upgrade. The one place you DON'T want to scrimp is in the hard drives - if you're spending this much on the machine, spend the extra for enterprise-grade drives, like the Seagate Constellation or the Western Digital Caviar RE4. Ideally, run them on a hardware RAID card that will do RAID5 or even RAID6, to give you some data redundancy - one drive failing means you lose 3TB of data all at once.

Wired is always more reliable than wireless. If you want analog wireless, you're going to pay handsomely for it. You can get into solid IP wireless (WiFi) for a decent price with Ubiqiti... but then either your cameras have to be all IP, or you have to add IP encoders to analog cameras, which will add to the cost as well. Ultimately, wireless of any sort should be viewed as a last resort, if it's absolutely NOT POSSIBLE (or HIGHLY impractical) to run wires.

Actually, most color e-book readers are using Android and should run the apps without any problem. They have minimal processors, but they're a good way to get into an Android tablet for cheap. Kindle Fire, Nook, Kobo Vox, etc.

While Tom's correct that there are TECHNICALLY differences in the terms, especially when looking at older systems, these days I think most manufacturers just use FPS and IPS interchangeably to means "frames per second".

Framerate has nothing to do with image quality, only with how frequently the DVR records the image. Check out the demo here: http://www.panasonic.com/business/security/demos/PSS-recording-rates.html D1 (aka 4CIF) is the highest recording resolution available in analog DVRs, equivalent to approx. 720x480 pixels. Many DVRs are still limited to CIF (352x240), or do D1 on only a few channels, or only at lower framerates... your main concern should be one that does D1 on all channels regardless of framerate.

Yeah, that kinda makes a difference... since NTSC and PAL are analog baseband video standards and have no relevance whatsoever to IP cameras. You would normally set the recording framerate in the NVR, not the camera. Using Geovision as your NVR? Or using analog cameras on it as well? I guarantee you GeoVision has the option to select analog recording framerates on a per-camera basis.

No, because a PAL frame also has greater vertical resolution (625 lines vs. 525). Since almost all DVRs give you the ability to set different *recording* frame rates per camera, and much lower than 25fps, this would be pointless anyway. There's no correlation between shutter speed and recording framerate. None. You could set your DVR to record at 7fps and your camera's shutter speed (IF it allows you to adjust it) to anything from 1/10s to 1/10,000s. You could record at 30fps and have one camera's shutter at 1/1000s, another camera's shutter at 1/6s. One has no effect on the other. All that aside, IF you switched your DVR to PAL, you would also have to use PAL-compatible cameras.

I'm in Canada, I've also bought some equipment from the US and had no problems with the shipping or any cross-border issues. It's hard to really say if you're getting your money's worth at $15,000 without more details on the exact equipment you were quoted, but for that size of install, it doesn't sound out of line. The DVRs we typically use list for $3500-$4000 for a 16-channel system; cameras generally run around $250-$300 ($4800 if you figure 16 cameras at the top of that range); and for installation, you're frankly looking at two guys for a full week - if you figure, for easy calculation, the integrator charges $75/hr per person, two guys for a full 40-hour week is $6,000 right there. You're alrady at $14,800, and that doesn't include incidentals like cable, connectors, etc. You could cut the equipment costs in half using something more basic and doing the work yourself... but remember, if it takes two pros a full week to do a job like this, it's going to take you a lot longer.

These are a 12V-powered DVR/NVR: http://www.3xlogic.com/prod/983/mvr-series-micro-video-recorder

http://www.3xlogic.com/prod/658/ndvr-series-ip-video-recording-solutions

If you mean the wireless range... no.

LOL you need to use the Panasonic calculator. Switching VMS is not going to change the compression from the cameras. If you want to see if you can get better compression switch cameras. ^This. At its most basic form, all an NVR does is receive the stream from the camera and write it to disk. Changing the NVR won't make any difference in the space used because the camera is sending the same stream to both of them.

Calculating disk space usage is something of a black art that relies as much on experience as tools - try six more calculators and you'll get six different answers. There are too many factors that affect how "compressable" an image is, including scene complexity, contrast, sharpness, color saturation. Then when you go to video, the amount of movement in the scene - ie. the level of change from frame to frame - affects it. Then you get the codec used, as different ones compress differently and work better for different situations... and then there's the quality vs. compression setting: the higher the compression, the more quality you lose, and most codecs give you some kind of control over this. Sometimes even the same codec from two different manufacturers will give you two different results, depending on how the specific manufacturer implements that codec. And of course, if you're doing motion-based recording, that can have a HUGE effect on the space used. There are simply too many variables for any calculator to give you an accurate answer - they're good for estimates only. No... it could just mean that Axis's tool favors their own cameras. There is no such thing. ONVIF has no control over space usage, since as noted above, there are too many user-controlled variables. RAID level used has nothing to do with how much space a camera uses.

What size (current rating) was the adapter? What's the maximum current the camera draws? If the camera requires "up to"1.5A, for example, and the adapter can only do 1A, that's your problem.

It's still in for a couple days for testing and comparison while I tweak the settings, but here are some preliminary shots. First from the VSX (2MP, 1600x1200, 3.3-12mm lens set at full-wide): Then the Dahua (2MP, 1920x1080, 3.6mm lens): When I first installed it, it was right beside the VSX, and got a lot of glare from the lights below: So I moved it over to where you see it in the photo above: Then at night: Then I switched it to B&W and upped the bandwidth a bit: And finally, this morning: It doesn't switch to B&W itself until it gets pretty dark, so I set it on a schedule... it does seem a little clearer in low light when it goes to B&W, despite not being TDN - less color artifacting from the gain boost, I suppose.

I'm sorry, but that analog pic is really dark with poor contrast and wonky color balance - that's not "typical" of analog camera technology. It's like they use the absolute crappiest camera they could find for the comparison. In fact, it looks like a camera with a failing sensor, or a poorly-configured (or misconfigured) DVR... or both. .

http://surveillance.aver.com/types/Embedded-hybrid-DVR Temporary test installation, beside a 3xLOGIC VSX-2MP-VD dome:

"Sometimes" meaning when, specifically?