MR2

Or you could just aim your IR higher, or get a wider angle IR, or reduce the shutter time on your camera so it absorbs less of the light Sounds great but in real world applications that I have seen reducing the output to get a proper exposure is a must. Aiming the IR unit so the light bounces of the ground or trees can help too. Shutter time can help too but adjusting the output and aiming the light typical give better results over a full 24 hour 365 days. Also add NuOptic to the IR list. They have IR, Whitelight and Hybrid units that have remotely adjustable FOV and power output. Good info! I wish there was a blurb under each company recommendation though... giving people's experiences with that companies product

Or you could just aim your IR higher, or get a wider angle IR, or reduce the shutter time on your camera so it absorbs less of the light

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=35868 Q & A Section

a few little bits.... on the Topic of IR: you REALLY don't want IR capability built in to the camera itself, not only does it attract all the insects(think spider webs) it also makes the camera essentially blind when you get fog or heavy rain, my general suggestion is have the IR out of the field of view of the camera itself (or facing away) and have them illuminate the area as you would with a normal flood light. with external IR you will probably find it cheaper to just put normal lighting, a show stopper is where you're placing the lights in an area that is residential or needs to be dark for whatever reason, at this point you have a few choices, you can go 850nm or 940nm, these are IR lights that run at slightly different wavelengths, the difference between them is the 850 is the one where you can see the glowing LED's, the 940 you don't see any glowing light at all, but it suffers from a greatly reduced range vs the wattage of the unit (rule of thumb seems to be 850nm for the same wattage will illuminate double the distance of a 940nm) the main reason I suggest normal (white) lighting is that the cost of your base IR light will be more expensive and generally will not give as good coverage(personal experiance, the IR does not seem to "fill" an area as well) Now, you have another option, if you're not trying to illuminate huge area's you can also go PoE powered, the advantage of this is all you do is run a few extra Cat5/6 Cables to your planned camera locations with a few extra meters (I try to leave 5) and then throw illuminators on when you wish without any more cabling and the switch powers them. this also gives the nice extra benefit of giving you the excuse to upgrade your switches (so you can upgrade the cheap 4 porter's to something nice and managed). with PoE you do have to be careful, there are two main standards for how much power the switch is able to provide to the device, you have PoE which is up to 15w, and then PoE+ which is 30w, I don't really see the point of putting an IR illuminator up that's only 15w when you can almost double your power (long story) to a PoE+ switch and the price difference between the illuminator wattages is very similar (in my experience $350 vs $450) the only time I'd stick with PoE is if you already have the cabling in place for PoE and you have already purchased PoE(only) switch's that were quite expensive aka don't want to upgrade your infrastructure. with the PoE illuminators unless you get the crazy expensive units there is not much you really need to do, they have Photo-voltaic's in them that sense when it's getting dark and flip on, which is generally before your camera decides it's too dark and flicks on it's IR filter, so by the time your camera switch's to IR the illuminator is already on, so all you are left to fiddle with is the intensity (not sure why you'd reduce it but it's there)

your iscsi bohemoth is not the typical NAS that our thread starter is talking about, the difference is chalk and cheese when you start talking about NAS units that include real hardcore Raid controllers with cache etc by all means inform us as to your full configuration including cost of the units + drives/rpm etc I also find it a bit rich that your calling it a Milestone limitation, fairly consistent with your previous posts though

what your boss needs, is not just a single camera, but a few. the IR he needs is not the type that's built into the camera (a ****ty idea, never do this) but the type that's a separate powerful unit.

Not very many NVRs/VMS will allow you to use network shares as storage targets so I would recommend you purchase a NAS with iSCSI support. This way you can setup a storage target that acts as a local drive in your NVR/VMS. I have been testing a Synology DS1812+ and I have been very happy with multiple Avigilon NVRs pointed to the unit without any issues. the issue also comes when you get a large amount of streams, seeing as Video footage from multiple simultaneous camera's gets dumped on the storage as random access, so your average disks cop a hiding! then with every other camera you add the load goes up exponentially, I personally think that NAS's are not suited to installations with anymore than 4 camera's, this situation is helped by raid controllers with cache, but we're talking cheap NAS's here. not only that but I prefer to have a larger range of camera's to plug into my system. now in theory your disks will handle a reasonable amount of this (depending largely on spindle RPM) but imagine what happens when you go back to review the footage!! and this is where I recommend building a dedicated NVR with a high speed disk/SSD, then get the NVR to archive to your NAS (Milestone is my Favorite) when the system archives it defrags the streams and sends them as single streams, which then means you can use cheaper/slower disks to store the huge amount of archived footage

So, do we have a price on this camera anywhere? a quick search has me finding pricing up at the $600 mark?? really?? http://www.ezcctv.com/attributes/cmplx_dt_sht/filename/Hikvision%20Trade%20Pricelist%20Jan-Feb%202013.pdf not sure why you're so keen on it if you're paying $600....

Sounds like another of these: http://www.securitycamera2000.com/products/Full-HD-1080P-IP-Camera-3-Mega-Day%7B47%7Dnight-IR-40m-Waterproof-2.8mm%252d12mm.html

http://www.securitycamera2000.com/products/Full-HD-1080P-IP-Camera-3-Mega-Day%7B47%7Dnight-IR-40m-Waterproof-2.8mm%252d12mm.html We're running them, quite happy

viewtopic.php?t=17850

And yet if their target market is still willing to pay, why should they alter their pricing? Just because the rabble/consumer market wants stuff cheaper doesn't mean the pro market suppliers have to go after it. The trick is in maintaining their desired volumes at the higher-end. It doesn't always make economic sense to go after a fish too big to catch. Plenty of companies have failed trying to serve a market beyond their capacities. It's not just the Lower end of the market that wants cheaper, I represent a group of companies and the managers of those companies are a whole lot more responsive to $500 per camera systems (including storage/software) than $1200 per camera systems that most of those Pro Suppliers, I'm not sure what the Volumes part of it comes in, what's important I thought, was that they continue to have their quality/performance gap, and frankly that is disappearing for many of them

no, I've never run Blue Iris, we tried a few software solutions and stuck with Milestone the second we found how good the Mobile Client is (for our off site management) They have a free version that works with 8 cameras...huh...interesting. Capture all your markets below Express in theory, will not do an Automated export to archive though. also the free one is limited to 5 days of footage if I remember correctly but then 169 for the base and 79 or whatever per camera seems reasonable to me for what you get (pricing from Techcctv)

Not always, but with evolving technologies the price point for the 'latest and greatest' usually stays the same. It's the price for the older generation gear that usually decreases. For two reasons, one because they're making enough of them in volume to gain benefits from economies of scale. Or, two, because they can't sell 'em anymore and it's a fire sale. In addition as these shifts occur there's often an uptake by previously untapped markets. What might have once only been the province of pro or commercial consumers suddenly opens up to the larger residential consumer market. At the same time that new market being less educated but cost-conscious may willingly make lower-end choices that previous 'pros' would never chose. Is this bad? Tech products are a rapidly changing landscape. Keep up or sit tight with what you know. Just don't expect the rest of the market to stay behind with you. Exactly... except some companies have forgotten that they are not bleeding edge anymore and are still charging like wounded animals as opposed to gradually dropping their pricing as the market catch's up to the point where people forgive their shortcommings

no, I've never run Blue Iris, we tried a few software solutions and stuck with Milestone the second we found how good the Mobile Client is (for our off site management)

I've attempted to run 2 x 3mp Geo's on a HP DC7800 USDT, this is essentially a laptop CPU it it was not impressed! it ran, but it was slow to connect, very slow for the mobile client... we then upgraded our business system to a second hand hp DL380 G5, it cost $2k for a pair of quad core 3.4ghz processors, 8gb of ram, a P400 raid controller and 8 x 10k 146 GB HDD's in raid 10... at the moment it idles along at ~5-10% cpu usage with 13 camera's, all of them running at 3mp (2048x1536) and 12 FPS, load up the mobile client and this kicks up to 30%, we're about to connect another 6 camera's so I'll let you know how it goes! Milestone is AWESOME, people complain about price but for the Express version it's $169 to start and then $80 per camera that you add to it, you CAN pay yearly maint but you don't HAVE to so it works out very well for us.

I gotta say, I don't see why people have their knickers in a knot... the price of EVERYTHING comes down, there will ALWAYS be people willing to see how good the cheap stuff is, people will be doing things you "don't agree" with, if you don't agree with it, considering we're only talking about cheap camera systems, why get stressed? not sure you'd be so worried about people asking for tech support, if you want to help... help, if you don't... then don't! but why would you get angry at people willing to sacrifice what they perceive is a small amount of quality for a 1/2 in price? what really amuses me is that the big brands rarely keep up with what all the "other" and usually asian based companies are doing, Geovision was mentioned.... Get Geovision to talk with some of the big NVR systems to gain support? GOOD LUCK!!! I find that a lot of the larger established companies think that their product is "good enough" they should have a good lock in the rear view, the other companies are catching up, and FAST. Case in point, Mobotix don't have a 5mp 360 degree, say what you want, but more pixels with a matching lens, is better, plenty of cheaper companies are offering 5mp, and these have good lenses and are half the price, look in the rear view mirror guys.

You need to test everything you do before putting a whole system in... if you want to know if an IR light will be effective, take one and throw it in there, see what happens if the camera's do not have an IR function it won't work though.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/898355-REG/Iluminar_IR312_A120_POE_Medium_Range_IR_Illuminator.html pretty sure that's the Illuminator I've got now to hunt down a 24w 120 degree version for cheap cheap

Interesting, I wanted the reseller to swap it for a 120 degree but he refused this one set me back around $500, anyone aware of a more reasonably priced source?

These are the ones we tried: http://www.advanced-led-technology.com/images/data_sheets/im_p.pdf

yeah quite a few ebay vendors are now selling Grandstream rebadged, I'm presently playing with a 3meg outdoor version, actually works quite well

Yah Wrong!

Everyones info is WAY off Hello Michael I believe the Q24 successor, Q25 will be launched around the Q3 timeframe, perhaps in the August / September time frame. From Mobotix themselves.

Depends on what you're after honestly the Dahua are not bad, they don't quite tick all my boxes so I'm playing with this thing: http://www.securitycamera2000.com/products/Full-HD-1080P-IP-Camera-3-Mega-Day%7B47%7Dnight-IR-40m-Waterproof-2.8mm%252d12mm.html so far it works very well with Milestone (Onvif) and the picture is quite good the only issue is I have is the night vision appears to be getting feedback, I think I've found the issue but until I can confirm it'd I'd be worried about it's night vision capabilities