cctv_down_under

I would be every surprised if your tv does not have an AV input?

The reason they all look the same is because most of them are, the truth is that there are actaully VERY few manufactorers of CCTV Cameras and in fact this company alone manufactures for thousands of OEM suppliers. http://www.koreacctv.com/ As for your scenario, you probably wont be happy until you go for a high quality dome camera or more likely a full body camera, unless you can set up motion lights....they are pretty chep and easy to set up and then your cam has all the light it needs!

I would trade the sun to watch Man U win the double over there, besides I got fair skin

Camera comparision http://www.cctvforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=6562&highlight=camera+comparison

how much voltage drop will I get on cat5 using 24vac at 120 meters

I only sell Bosch now, but I am hapy to compare if I had anything, I did make a comparison with Baxall and a few of the bosch cams and I have posted several snapshots.

Fair call Rory, But please consider I have sold almost every camera on that list and tested them all thoroughly, I know I am definately...let me say that again...definately biased towards the Bosch range but in my opinion they most certainly are the best. I have used the GE cameras quite a bit and the ONLY reason they are further down the list is because of reliability issues. As a representative and as a advisor to consultants I have compared many products side by side, however never at a level that I am satisfied with (with the correct equipment for testing) comparing side by side is not a fair comparison at any rate, becasue you rarely do a 24hr test. I definately think that because of the xf's 15 bit ability it certainly is the best camera on the market today and with its features it definatley leads the way. I rememebr when this whole forum started and you said the following - I will never use a PC based system - Geovision is not a very good product - Standalones are the ONLY DVR you would ever use I wish you would take my word on the cameras and test them I would be happy to offer one to you if you are prepared to pay the frieght to return it, or even sell it to you at a loss to prove my point. I know the products you like and to be honest I agree with most of your recomendations, but I think if you used one you might change your tune..it is important to note though that price is always an option and so is customer service and I beleive you have had a bad experience with Bosch. The prices you mention though are way off the mark and yes I am aware of your importing issues that change your prices but keep in mind Bosch is only a new player and to be leading the market at this early stage is incredible. It will only get better and better from Bosch as they re invest in their organisation becasue they are not owned and spend a massive amount on reseach, I have to admit not a lot has been done with the old Burle/Phillips models but the XF is something to behold especially the Day Night version. keep in mind though that not many scenarios require the use of an XF and in fact in constant and good light almost any camera looks similar. XF's (the XF stands for extra features) are just a camera that suits all needs, they handle smoke filled environments, long cable runs, bad backlight, low light, scenes with loads of different colour ranges, wide dynamic scenarios, and scenes that require dynamic shutter speeds, they have the ability to send ONLY the least noisy frame out of many sampled, reducing storage space and the ability to configure locally, or at the dvr and even off site. I hear people talk about the expense but lets face it you do not make money on cheap systems and also when you take into consideration the following: If an installer charges $60 per hour... - saving on back focus time 25 mins - no need for a distribution amp Possibly saving $100 - configuration at the DVR end means you do not need to spend money to have someone on the ladder and someone holding it. - upgrading or changing settings saves around $25 per camera it certainly adds up in the long run. I can honestly tell you in all the time I have sold Bosch product I have seen 3 items fail, 1x DVR which was OEM'd by Bosch 1x Dome camera and 1x full body camera (which had been struck by something) that is amazing! I have nver seen the same reliabilty with any other product and that alone is important, as you grow you put in many cameras, and it does not take long to have sold 352 cameras...if one fails a year you are repaireing and replacing every day. Margins get smaller and smaller and brand names are easier to sell in most places (no not yours)..you really should compare the Bosch product!

My installer has run cat5 for a site I am doing with 50 odd cameras, some of the runs are over 150 meters and I suppose this is why he did it (wish I knew I would have just used the XF camera), he is using a passive balun at the camera end and a rack munted recieving station (also passive) that recieves 4 x cat 5 and converts to coax, I am concerned with running 24V AC on such small wires and within the same sheath, can there be some issues with this becasue some of the cameras will draw at least 500ma?

I have to say I prefer full body cameras in recess mounts for nightclubs and bars, I had never found a dome that cut the mustard well enough, the problem you see with al the noise is more to do with Gain, you can not set gain control on most dome cameras, it is either auto or off, but now they have released the new Bosch Domes, these are actually full body cameras in a dome body, they have to be recessed or surface mounted with an adaptor, but the best bit is through the Bilinx software you can SET the gain level threshold, this means you can decide how much gain is added, these cameras are so low light anyhow that little gain is needed and the full body electronics allows for beautifull piccies

My two cents...I will say before I start have worked in wholesale for a very long time and have sold almost everybrand and have worked directly for at least one of the above mentioned manufactorers. It really depends on what you want the camera to do, the fact that it is internal and not in harsh light really means you would not need the XF, there have been a few more released since the first XF like the Day Night XF and the Daynight IP camera. I am extreemly fond of the XF series for some major reasons. It has 15 bit capability, this is a bigger data path therefore it can see more light levels and more colours than any other camera in it's class, in my opinion only Panasonic comes close to this, and still falls way short. Because it can see more light levels it can see lower light levels and therefore is an excellent low light camera, so are the Panasonic and Ikegami cameras, keep in mind that although some cameras are rated for low light, there are many ways to cheat the specs and infact some cameras that perform well in low light overshoot during the day - I have had this experience with most Samsung cameras. The Bosh and the Pano can be upgraded with software and they both support configuration from either a Bosch or Pano DVR or up the coax cable, this means once you have your view you can sit back at the DVR to asjust settings and upgrade the camera. Both Bosch and Pano offer long warranties the Bosch being 3yrs, one of the draw cards of the XF is that you can save its settings and flash it to the next camera, which saves a lot of time when doing multiple perimeter o traffic cameras. The other advantages are that it has a cable compensation built in to the camera, thsi means distance runs are not an issue IE coax up to 800 Meters, it also ensures all cameras appear with the same balance on your screen. There are three modes in the Bosch XF, and this means easy set up, they are Traffic, 24hr and Low Light, this means that all the settings for each purpose are automatically adjusted for you. There is also no need to do a back focus with a ND filter on a Bosch camera as this can be simultaed by the camera itself. The camera has inbuilt motion detection ad a dynamic shutter that can adjust itself on the fly but possibly the most powerful option is the input alarm on the camera, it allows the camera to swicth between modes from any closed circuit...IE arm the alrm system and turn of the lights and your camera will switch to low light mode. In my opinion the cameras that I ahve tried so far get this rating out of 10 Bosch 9.5 Panasonic 9 Ikegami 8 Sanyo 7 Pelco 6 Samsung 6 Ganz 6 Baxall 5 GE 4 Sunkwang 4 LG 4 But that is just my opinion

What shutter speed is th camera set to and what gain level?

try the pano PTZ's the IP range goes very low light

Send me the link by PM and I will look

Geovision does I think

Basically anytime you are watching video on a pC whether through the DSP live display or just the Capture card itself, you are watching digitized video, this will never be as good as analogue video for viewing for many reasons, the first is that there are many video standards, so in order to have capture chips that accomodate all standards, they need to basically crop or stretch the images they also haev issues when interlacing the video. When you dont have the DSP card you are almost watching what you are recording, compressed video and when you use the DSP you are basically watching minimized, stretched and digitized video, the reason standalones dont have this issue is they do not have to digitize the video for display through the video card to your monitor. The reason the DSP is so expensive is that in order to get 25fps real time display you need 16 processing chips (1 for each camera) but if you only recorded 4 cameras without a DSP you could use one or two 25fps chips, IE 25fps divided by the number of cameras, so it is cheaper to manufacture. Yes you can Tpiece off the fly leads, but what a mess, the biggest issue is that the MUXing component, IE getting many cameras on one chip is expensive so if you only wanted to choose 1 camera at a time in clear vision you could use what is known as a looping switcher and you would wire the cams to this and then to your DVR, but then you have to press a button for each camera, you could use a MUX with looping outputs but once again you are paying for something the DVR already does. Looping switchers are very common indeed, but the new combo cards allow for programmabe DSP, this means you can choose any layout from the cameras displayed on a AV Capable montior, the trade of is that you loose the DSP smooth effect on the DVR if you enable it. Basically a looping switch will look 100%, using a the looping function of the DSP will look 85% and converting the video from digital to analogue or visa versa is about 50%

not sure about the first one, but you can set the center software to continuasly stream and continuasly record, just dont have a copy set up so i cant find it right now, I remember it was in a weird place though

I am not sure but cant you just set permissions for this, only admin can delete the files that way! I dont dot h paste thing - it is too confusing for the end user, I use the OS system burn option, much easier but limited to mostly CD

most PTZ's (good ones have this feature built in now or as a plug in) it is not all that accurate, the only really accurate way is to wire sensors into the PTZ for zonal display

I disagree with Rory there, you can have embedded XP in many forms and you can trim it down massively, I agree that XP hardly has any concerns these dyas if set up correctly, however we have designed an embedded version that suits DVR and this is much more stable.

yes I have but I had to modify the firmware as it was not very powerfull, it is not a good solution because it will only allow you to serach through what is printed on the reciept...therefore things like open department sales or corrections on the reciept will not show up. There are better solutions that are at a software level, these use electronic software journals to read the entire data, this means you can filter right down. IE monitor Operator 45's transactions that were authorised by a supervisor, that had a staff discount of more than x% and contained ciggarettes and included voids that were over $50. Basically it is cheaper in the long run for larger POS (IE multiple lanes) because you do not need to pay for multiple data capture box's per register...mind you there is a way to use 1x Geovision data capture to do all registers...but that is my little firmware upgrade

There are many levels so this is a very open question, almost every DVR on the market allows for motion activated JPEG email, but motion activation can be triggered falsly a lot, so it is hardly accurate, there are some DVRs like Geo that allow for many sensitivity settings in one image, however to be accurate you need to use a hardware sensor to activate the email on a DVR through an IO connection, this will ensure no false readings

You are probably going to be better of not using a DVR at all, you could simply use a webserver (or obviously a DVR) and set up a FTP, you can then set the JPEG intervals, but if you want to have the actual .AVI style file then a DVR would be the best option, there are many that you could set to 1fps but they will not be individul files unless you FTP

Thats cool but expensive

There are many that record in MPEG2, but the problem is the storage, the Sanyo is a single ch unit and records in MPEG2

With one camera only, the bandwisth is allowable to up the resolution, I agree about most IP cams, but you can now buy an XF that is ip and analogue, two outputs, of course compression affects it but that happens at a dvr anyhow