cctv_down_under

What is the link for the IC? I have seen the March Product, very nice indeed, every DVR comes with a UPS inside, you do indeed have to be trained in order to sell them, this means no backyarders selling thier product. The new R% engine is pretty impressive, but the best thing about March Networks, beyond any doubt is the POS Integration, it is quite unique and very very powerfull. I have tried GE and liked it, found it hard to operate at first, but after some time it really was a breeze, it has excellent resolution and some pretty coool features for a standalone DVR, I have seen one crash though, which I found dissapointing considering it was a standalone. My faves in the Standalone world are: Dedicated Micro's GE/Kalatel Bosch Divar These are currently the three main players in the gaame that I know of!

Comments?

I know this is going to sound very stupid...but... I have seen this before, the only thing i could think of is that there actually is a shadow created from the outside moonlight and that the camera is so sensitive it can see it! I have had a Bosch Camera in a room with next to no light and saw a shadow from the chair on the wall, there is obviously some light there and just because our eyes can not see it, this does not mean the camera can not! Am I totally wrong?

And be very wary of the little crappy fans on them, they die very rapidly

Depends on what DVR using, some like Geo havea De Interlace Renderer option, the tearing affect happens when interlacing video, are u using PAL or NTSC?

You are indeed correct, the Bilinx software comes for free on the XF Promo cd, therefore you only need the adapter!

hmmm, attachments do not seem to work

cool

Way too chunky for my liking, but like Rory says, it is just new, I found logging in an issue, it did not seem to update the passwords even after I had saved it. My only concern is that if everyone does need to log in again, then a lot of people will have forgotten the email or not be using the old email they used to log in, and you need both username and email???? to get your log in details, therefore I hope we have not lost anyone. I can not wait to see everyones avatars though!

http://www.geovision.com.tw/english/10_1.asp?stable1=Solution&sfiled=pgid&pno=15

Guys I have not seen many reports on product from the show, can you all advise what you were impressed with?

I would have to agree with most of the posts made here, and although you state you do not need to identify the person, I beg to differ, to identify and PROSECUTE someone you need fairly substantial evidence, not just a "I know who that is", you need to be able to argue in court that the person on the footage is ACTUALLY the person on the footage! You mentioned Vapor lights, do you mean Sodium Vapor, as these are the worst kind for CCTV, I suggest you buy yourself a PC and add a cheap capture card, this way when your annoyance goes away, you at least have a new PC that you can use or sell, perhaps even rent a PC, you could buy a very cheap standalone device but for that price range I would not expect reliability. I would also purchase a distribution amplifier and a cheap RF modulator, they really do not cost that much, this way you can pump it into your existing televisions. I understand the need for cheap stuff, but keep in mind that you do not buy a toothbrush to sweep the floor, it may appear that some people do not want to sell anything cheap so they can make money, but I can assure you that you make MORE money in the short term selling cheap equipment, the reason they do not want to sell it and prefer to make less and sell something better is because they do not want it to break on you. You do not want to sell a car and have it die or the wheels fall off, I STRONGLY suggest you find someone in your area and tell them straight up your budget!! They will tell you what they can give you for that amount and then you can ask us if the equipment will do what you need. I have seen many a video evidence thrown out of court due to lack of identification, so you may indeed not save anything at all if you waste your money on something that is not fit for purpose. And BTW we do not think you are cheap, IN FACT I have done sites that have totalled well over 1 Mill in CCTV infrastructure, however I do not have a single camera in my house (well none plugged in anyhow) so I would not think that anyone here would think you were cheap at all.

You can have anything from remote emails to streaming video, best i have seen is the geo center system

This is the best one I have seen, even has GPS http://www.marchnetworks.com/products/5308mdvr.asp

I am actually amazed that geo can not allow a demo version for all the people who sell it, i eman really how hard is it to do for them, they only need to allow the software to be loaded and run without the card, sure you would have to overlay live shots and that may not look nice but searching and all the other features could easilly be used, it is a shame because no one wants to cart around a bulky system to show people

The 232 connection is for short runs, your 485 is the data that tells the system via voltage variance which way to turn the camera, you will need to have the 485 mode running if you are using 485 to transmit the data and 232 mode will need to be off, most dvr's have what is known as a 232 to 485 converter this is in some cases an additional component, from thsi component you can have several wires, most commonly three a Transmit Positve A transmit Negative and a ground wire, the other teminals you have on the camera are usually Transmit (TX) out positive and Transmit out negative and they usually loop out to the next PTZ in the series, some PTZ's require you to terminate the end of the run, therefore if you have two cameras you unterminate the frst one and from the TX out + and the TX out - you continue the wires to the next ptz, the termination can be in the software onboard the firmaware of the device or in some brands it is also a requirement to have a terminating resister at the last PTZ. The PTZ number is the physical address of the camera, this means camera 1 needs dip 1 and camera two needs dip 2 so the signal knows where to terminate it's data. If you are trying to control the camera with P protocol, I am not sure about Panasonic but I thought P was for Pelco protocol, both P and D protocols work at different baud rates so be carefull, the other thing is that if you are trying to send Pelco protocol to the Pana cam, you need to switch the Pana cam into Pelco mode first (assuming it can be done). Pana have soem weird things with remote programming so perhaps there is a need for more wires, the best way to check is to put a mulitmeter at the end of the 485 signal, try moving the direction and see if the voltage changes, if there is no change then the signal is not getting there. I have never used Pana's so very sorry i can not help, the easiest way for you to test is going to be lending a pana keyboard first

I came accross this problem, once and only once!! What i chose to do after this was to prepare a sign off document, the aim of this is to take a snapshot of every image from the DVR at the point of sign off, you then get them to initial each image saying that they are satisfied with the view that they have from that camera, at the end of the document you put all your disclaimers in and make them sign properly for the handover, this also stops cameras beeing moved by the customer, therefore if they want you to come to site because a camera is moved, you can prove it was not the way you had installed it and if they want you to move one, then you charge them because they had signed off on the release documentation. I have a few examples that I use in my proposals that show the same image view from different sized lenses, it shows a house viewed from a 2.5mm lens and then shows the images of narrower lenses as well, this shows them that when you zoom in you loose the width and make it perfectly clear to the customer how the angles will change. There is also an advantage to having a 1/3" digital SLR camera that has a wide range of lens, you can then stand on a ladder and take two shots, you can say that the lens goes between 5mm and 50mm and here are the views, you can have either at the same cost but you will need to decide. licence plate stuff is hard to promise and i only do it with cameras that are able to handle it and ONLY if a proper throttle point can be offered, you need fast shutter speeds to read plates, but fast speeds result in low light pictures and you also need to turn down the gain in the camera so that the headlights do not wash out the plates, this again makes the camera image darker, if you are zooming from a long way away then you are closing down the iris??? so again it will get darker and carparks are usually asphalt and therefore reflect very little light, so the best bet is to make a throttel point and mount your camera very close to where the car must travel through, using speed bumps or speed signs can also greatly assist in reducing the speed of the vehicle so that you can have a faster shutter speeds. I have seen some handy cameras that can do inversion which makes the bright white lights look black and makes the contrast of the licence plate stand out. OCR can be very difficult without cameras that are purpose built for the application.

We have done several Hybrid based installs, now, they are quite usefull indeed, there are obvoiusly several ways to do it. The advantages are quite unique, we recently did a establishment (pub) that also had a Motor inn accros the road, so we installed 28 Analogue cameras in the PUB and Bottle shop and put in 3 Ip based cameras in the Motor in, the system then streams to the Hybrid DVR without the need of cables, one of the best parts was that the Motor Inn receptionist can now sit at her apartment within the Motel rather than manning the reception after hours, we included a Decoder that was used with the the other stream from the Encoder, this allowed us to link the encoder to stream to the decoder in her apartment whenever somene pressed the buzzer, this meant that whenever someone pressed the buzzer she would hear a noise from the decoder and when she did that she only needed to to switch her television to the AV channel to watch the live decoded video. It also meant we did not have to cable accross the road. Another application was a Hybrid machine at an airadrome, the encoders supported Pelco Protocol so we were able to havea wireless network that could control the PTZ without having to run wires to the actual camera at al, it also meant we could record in high quality but transmit back to the encoder in lower quality, this meant that the moving pictures from fast moving PTZ's were more responsive and there was less latency with the keyboard controls. They were very impressed that they could use the same keyboard!

Thats the one, you need the Bilinx tool though, it is a fair bit more expensive than the others. http://www.boschsecurity.us/index.aspx

The cheapest is the LTC0440, but this was originaly designed by Phillips and not much has changed, it still gives excellent colours and is still reasonably low lux, but it has only standard settings and you may find it compensates too heavily for areas with large saturation of colours. The next step up is the Bosch made LTC0455 this is the old style D/N cam, not the IR filter one, it is only a few bucks more and has night sense, the night sense by defualt is pretty poor but if tweaked with gain it works out quite reasonable. The step after that is the LTC0485 XF, and this is a real beauty, it still only has night sense and old style D/N, but the features list is rich and it is 15 bit, the picture quality is excellent. After that you get to the LTC0495, the first of the true D/N, this is one of the best low light cameras I have ever seen, there are 1/2" versions of the XF and this camera but i doubt you would ever need it. The last step is the IP camera, it is quite unique as it has smarts built into the camera for video content analysis etc, it also has bth IP and composite outputs and can send lots of different ways, it is still a little overpriced in my opinion. The SDIII is awesome as well, but I find it hard to buy because of the prices.

AV is right, the problem is that in low light the lens aperture changes causing a change in depth of field, this can throw a camera out of focus, i agree with rory that if you stick to focussing your camera at night time you have achieved pretty much the same effect, I just find it a pain to open the iris manually then have to place my hand in front of the camera and then hold a ND filter and i hate sticking around on job sites at night....mind you i do not live in the lovely bahamas, where I come from if you are out at night your breath gets frozen in the wind. It is also much easier to focus the camera with the virtual back focus mode, because you can actually see better what you are trying to focus on. It really is a bit of a "who cares" thing, but we back focus all our cameras and we show the customer the "before and after" affect, this really impresses them, then we go back to the DVr and adjust things like compensation or gain settings and they are usually very impressed. i even had one of my techs deliberately set the camera to traffic mode and reduce the gain so that the image was dark, he then took the camera to site and installed it, the customer said "it is pretty good", then with the bilink he defualtted it into low light mode which changed the shutter spped and the gain plus the sens up feature and HEY PRESTO! I actually repromanded him for wasting time, but i wish I had thought of it. Basicaly a back focus does take time, it is indeed fiddly and it is easier with cameas that can do it automatically, there is a big difference between focussing a camera at night and making sure the ccd chip is the correct distance from the lens. Rory i have never seen a lens with that F stop that was inexpensive enough, i wuld be interested to try it, what IRE was that lens rated at. Keep in mind the F Stop is only really a measurement, it does not reflect the light gathering ability of the lens, a plastic lens can have the same f stop but light will not travel very well through it, it really comes down to the quality of the glass that is used and the ability the lense has to ACCURATELY (without floors in the glass causing light bounce) distribute the light to the CCD. I admit the pixel technology in the ex view is good, but being more sensitive does not always mean that it is better under low light and there are always several ways to read the specs

I had heard that the Bosch cameras are expensive on that side of the world, they are cheap here, very cheap in fact, they are cheaper than Samsung, Pelco, Ganz, Ikegami, GE and Sanyo it seems you guys get ripped off over there. I have to partly disagree with you Rory, i think a back focus should always be done when there is a need for a camera to look at a dark scene, however you can get lucky not doing it. All I can tell you is, of the many i tested in this mode, more than half of them were out of back focus and therefore not focussing correctly at night. I have tried the Exview cameras before and had found that although they are sensitive t low light, they did not compare to the Pana or Bosch under low light conditions, I have done quite extensive testing on a lot of cameras, because we always test everything before we sell it, and i have not found a camera that outperforms the Pana for low light ability, mind you the Bosch is pretty good. I think a lot of people think you need to buy the XF camera to get this back focus feature and you do not need to, therefore it really is not that expensive. We took into consideration the time that Back focus takes and set up at the camera end and realised that if we were charging our installers $50 per hour and it took 15 Mins to back focus and 15 Mins more to set up the features due to no remote settings and if it saved 15 mins less per camera to update the settings for the camera up the coax (once you have set one up you can save it and upload it to another camera), plus because of occupational heath and safety standards, we have to have two people at a ladder at any one time we realised that even if we saved roughly 30 mins per camera: Therefore 2 installers = 1hr or $50 per camera and when you multiply that by 16 cameras that is $800 per site...quite a savings, but I have to say the main reason is because when you sit down in front of your DVR and set up the cameras in your chair, the customer is very very impressed.

Please do not wind him up

it is seperate to turning on the web cam, the rpb is not just a tick radio button, it acts as a server therefore you need to make the seperate application run at startup and look for the connection, well at least you used to have to i have not used Geo in a long while

You also need to run the RPB software from the Geo machine or it will not connect, there is also an option to run it on start up!