coldeye

I just bought one of these, to start experimenting with IP cameras and NVRs... http://goo.gl/zHktR I obviously wasn't expecting much in quality from the cheapest IP camera package I could find, but it seems like, in a side by side comparison with QSee 600TVL analog cameras in one of their standard DVRs, the quality of the 720p IP camera is only marginally superior - ENTIRELY due to heavy compression artifacts. In other words, I can easily see how much crisper and higher res the image from the QNC7001B cameras are when compared to the mediocre analogs, but the image from the IP cameras are so dominated by glaring compression, that they are no better at recognizing anything. Is this expected behavior, or is there some way to reduce the compression? And I guess in general, should I expect a 720p camera to beat a 600TVL in real world tasks like reading license plates and recognizing facial features, or only in technical metrics like pixels in the sensor, etc?