Soundy

Forget them all - Cisco "Flip" cams and USB webcams are all you need. They're better than "real" CCTV cameras in every respect and they'll cost you <$100 each. Problem solved, case closed, end of story, let's all just go home. Time for me to take up that career in underwater basket weaving.

Well then, I guess you're right, it's all a scam, MP CCTV cameras are overpriced, there's nothing special about them, and they can all be easily replaced by Flip cams. That's it, starting now, I'm scouring eBay for them, and I'm gonna start quoting nothing but Flips on all future sites. Next one is about a 46-camera installation, so I guess I'll need a few of them...

Pitt Meadows is home... our office is in Coquitlam, but we do service all over BC and Alberta. I'm in Victoria and Nanaimo for service calls later this week.

Where are you located, Andy?

There's a difference though, between "fluff" and requirements for the job at hand. A security camera, for example, NEEDS the ability to use different lenses for different purposes. A low-end consumer camcorder does not. If you want a camcorder that provides this feature, it adds substantially to the cost - see, for example, the Canon GL-1, listing at Amazon.com for a tidy $3,300. "Zoom with your feet" is acceptable for something hand-held; it doesn't work with fixed installations.

Half the time I find I know more about the products we use, than their own manufacturers' tech support... or at least, I'm just more adept with technology on the whole than most manufacturers' first-level support techs.

There's no reason any <1/2" camera shouldn't work just fine with a 1/2" lens.

Picky, picky, picky (Oh, and speaking of incorrect... *You're)

Hmmm, good to know! I have a 1/3" IQEye 2.5-7mm MP lens on it and I get no "tunnel" effect at all (put one of these on an AV3155 once and the tunnel vision was hideous even at 7mm). Knowing this though, I can swap over the 5MP 4.5-10mm lens I have on the 755 now when I swap it for the Dahua and should get a better comparison.

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28mm on the 40D's APS-C sensor will give you about a 51-degree diagonal FOV. That's pretty close to what you'd get out of a 6mm lens on a 1/3" CCTV sensor. The CNB cams go out to 2.8mm, which will give you over 90 degrees diagonal FOV. So your camera is only showing you about 1/4 the area that the CNB is capable of. BTW, the Dahua cam is a box cam with C/CS lens mount, but also a 1/3" sensor, so for any given focal length, it will show about the same FOV as the CNB.

^This is a good point as well - in short, your digital image doesn't stop at the DVR, but goes through several other stages of processing, sizing, stretching, and other degradations before you see it. If you have a 1280x1024 monitor, with your DVR software, the camera window may be, say, 700x520 (just random numbers I pulled out of my arse)... so now you have a 702x480 image that you're resizing to 700x520, which will generate artifacts of its own... A lot of times you see widescreen monitors on DVRs that don't do widescreen display properly... a 19" monitor is typically 1440x900 "native" resolution (the actual number of physical image-generating pixels in the LCD panel), so then you might have the 1280x1024 display being resized again to 1440x900, and stretched horizontally to fill the screen... All put together, things like this can really adversely affect the image you're looking at.

I've done it... works okay with domes that offer some protection to the electronics from direct weather... not so well with box cams that give the electronics less protection.

Vigil's motion record works with it - why wouldn't it? Haven't tried the camera's motion detect - no need to.

They're ONVIF. Vigil works with it.

And how much is missed while you're pulling it out, unlocking it, and and starting the recording? But that's exactly the point: you want a camera that will do all these things, it costs more than $99. You want to pay only $99, you get something that won't measure up to a lot of the demands that a professional surveillance camera has to meet. It's really no different than the reason why $800 analog cameras are still made - and still sell - when you can get $20 analog cameras: you get what you pay for.

Sounds like a pretty good plan to start with! I've been testing one of the Dahua MP cams, it's looking pretty good so far on the bench, and I should be putting it out watching the street in the next day or two for a real-world comparison to an IQEye IQ755.

You'll want to check your various quality-related settings - if you're losing that much clarity, it sounds like you're recording at CIF resolution (352x240). How is it if you view it on a monitor connected directly to the machine, vs. over the network? You might want to check this thread as well: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=23471

Because viewing it on your TV is a direct analog video connection. Your DVR is taking that analog signal and digitizing it, which right there makes the picture "blocky" - how blocky depends on the resolution settings. Your DVR is also compressing the video, using one form or another of "lossy" compression, which means it discards some less important visual data to save space. So yes, the video quality is being reduced by the DVR - this is universal and there's no way to get away from it. Mitigate it, yes - avoid it, no. To further complicate it, some DVRs re-compress the video again when you view it over the network, to reduce bandwidth requirements even more and allow for smoother streaming.

Oh yeah, I totally understood what you need to do, it was just your description of the setup that was sorta random - took a couple read-throughs to get it. Spot output is a separate output on most DVRs that let you display any one camera independent of the main output. Some also allow you to configure a sequence - so for example, if you had one camera watching the menu board, and another on the entrance to the DT lane, you could have it flip back and forth between them. Loop-through means each input also has its own output that sends that channel back out - many DVRs have this, but not all. Either of these would give you a way to send the single camera out to a separate monitor without splitting the camera feed. The splitter will work, but again, potentially with a small drop in image quality... so if either of the other two methods are available, they're preferable. If not though, not the end of the world.

The problem with a lot of these bargain-basement brands is that they don't make or support any of their own equipment; they just buy someone else's stuff and slap their own name on it. So Q-See got a bad name by selling someone else's cheap crap; now they're sourcing better stuff that seems to be much improved; but tomorrow they could start sourcing junk again and you don't know which you'll end up with until you get it. And when you're selling something someone else made, you're largely reliant on them for the patches, fixes, updates, software, etc. - ship a bunch of stuff from a manufacturer that then goes under, and good luck ever getting patches again. That's not to say this is a bad thing in itself. That may not be the case with Q-See and a lot of similar vendors.

Not really, but I get the gist So if I follow: your office screen connected to a VGA or HDMI output from the DVR, and the composite out from the DVR runs into the VGA converter to then feed the drive-thru monitor, so both have the same display. If that's the case, you can leave the existing setup in place... add the T-splitter to the incoming camera feed, and send it to the DVR input, and to the converter box, and that should be it. IF you're replacing the DVR, though, check for a "spot" output - if it has that, that gives you the ability to send a specific camera (or usually, a sequence of cameras) to the output independent of the main screen. It would be preferable to hook the adapter box to that, not only because it gives you the ability to control what camera goes to the drive-thru screen, but splitting the camera signal WILL cause a minor drop in quality, while using the spot output will not. And again, if you get a DVR with loop-through inputs, you can run the camera into the DVR, and then back out from that camera channel to the monitor, which also avoids the quality-loss problem.

You know very well how many times this "?" was discussed before do u really wanna go there again ? I respect what u done, I respect what You like I simply have my own opinion about so called "D1" recording that all If You want I will gladly call you direct to talk about in private Thx None of this is relevant to the OP's question.

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In theory, it would work... the main thing you'd need to worry about burning out would be PoE injectors themselves. Plus, if one injector or splitter went offline, ALL the devices would probably go offline, as one injector would then be powering them all. At some point, it just becomes more efficient, effective and reliable to simply run separate power lines to each device.