thx123a

Hello, Recently I have been testing out different PTZ analog camera setups and I have been curious about the camera modules that are inside most of them. For example a few weeks ago I bought a cheap brand name PTZ analog camera and it was just that, you get what you pay for I suppose. The video quality was so bad that even the rep couldn't argue about returning it. I was trying to find out if the camera module inside these units could be replaced with another camera module(better image quality at least) and though they told me that I could do that, they only said that I could use one of the standard Sony camera modules, and would not give a few model numbers to work with, which of course led me to googling anything and everything I could find out, talk about spending you days and nights quickly. Since then I have gotten a few more PTZ analog cameras in and even through the manuals are funny as hell to read, only some of them will tell you which camera modules will work with the camera, BUT they don't tell you which camera module is currently installed. My conclusion is that I would have to open one up and hope that there is a model number or something that will tell me if it was made by Sony or some other brand. So I am wondering, with all these made in China PTZ cameras, where the hec does one purchase these modules, depending on the brand, or is it that the end user commonly cannot purchase directly? The list of camera models I am have gotten 'some' information on are: SONY - sony 480, sony 490, sony 980, sony 990, sony 1000, sony 1010 SANYO - sanyo md600, sanyo md800 lg 16, lg 27, kpc-18, lg lm-922, lg lm-923, lg lm-927, cnb m2260, cnb m2360, cnb m2760, cnb 21Z22, cnb 21z27 HITACHI - vk214, vk274, vk454, vk858, vk654, vk888 SANYO - sdm-230, sdm-335, sdm-375, scm-2231, scm-2251, scm-2271, scm-2301 wx-22, wx-23, wx-27, wx-30, mjz-22, mjz-27, mjz-30, ss-803, ss-823, ss-922, ls-22, xf-27 The list probably goes on for days, but you get the idea, what I want is to one find a source to purchase these camera modules(at least the ones that are not garbage). I understand I need to know what I am looking for, which is so far 27x optical zoom, at least 600tvl, and IR Does anyone know which ones are the more common ones used ? I appreciate any ideas/feedback Thanks

Hello, Yeah I know the subject looks kinda odd but after almost a year I decided to start making the change. When I first started all of this I used a dedicated pc along with software (Blue Iris) and a pair of Panasonic WV-NS202A's mounted outside in outdoor enclosures. The image quality is great, unfortunately the company that sold them to me failed to mention that these camera's do not see in total darkness, they did tell me their customers used these at night all the time, but I learned later on for places like parking lots where there are other light sources. I am out in the middle of nowhere and there are no light sources at night, I even tried flood lights, but the result wasn't worth the effort. A few months later I added a 4 port analog capture card (PV-149) and also purchased a KT&C camera with night vision, to my surprise this worked really great at night as well as daytime. A few weeks after that I got 3 additional camera's with night vision(Vonnic's and some other brands I can't remember at the moment), all of these are working great, no complaints other than the occasional spider tormenting the hell out of the motion alarms and some foggy nights. The dedicated PC I ran all of this on is a quad core (Core I7 860) with 4gb of ram and 2tb of storage. The bad part, it has to run windowsXP only, the PV-149 capture card does not work in Windows 7, no drivers available. So you can imagine with all these camera's running it starts to really eat up resources among other things. After doing research on all of this I decided that the best solution is to get a dedicated DVR with support for 8 cameras and plenty of storage. Earlier this week I got in a Q-See QS-408 DVR and added a 2TB hard drive. So far I think the DVR is ok, there are some things it's lacking in, however nothing that can't be worked around for the time being. I have to rant here... In the past couple of weeks I made the horrible mistake of purchasing a Zmodo CM-Z2213GY PTZ camera. The first unit wouldn't even show colors correctly during the day, as their demo of it shows, the night vision on this thing was excellent though, RMA'D that one back and within a week ZModo sent me a replacement, and this one was worse, not only did it have the same problem as the first one, but the power supply was no good and the night vision was crap, after running it outside with my own power supply tonight for a couple of hours I noticed that it was entirely washed out, like the ir leds just went into high power mode or something(And there is no setting to turn the ir leds off or on BTW). There is no heater or cooling unit like they says it has, even though you can set the focus and iris to manual mode but it does not work, sometimes when you reboot the camera, the default language changes to chinese(lots of fun trying to go through the menu and get English set back). Long story short this camera is literal junk and is out of here. I attached a pic of what it shows currently. I can't believe some of the junk that's sold out there.

Yeah that was a pretty bad time I was having, I think I made up a few new words on that one. Since a few weeks ago I ended up returning the Q-See DVR, I was having issues with recording (kept getting error messages on the dvr itself and random reboots) and ended up going with the Dahua-FULLD1-8 DVR and have never looked back, awesome DVR unit. I have owned a few Q-See stationary cameras before, had no issues, but their new PTZ IR cameras, well i'll just say that there is a reason they are now trying to sell them on EBay(and cheap at that).

Thank you for the info.

This is great, thank you! The PTZ setups I have came with a listing of different camera modules that worked with each one. Thanks again

The kinds of modules I am talking about look like the pic attached, i've noticed that most of these outdoor ptz setups can use different camera modules.