saljar

Hi. I am beginning a CCTV project for a factory and I'm searching some advice. I will need between 6 to 10 outdoor IP cameras with: - 720p minimum / H.264 (with configurable bandwidth) - PoE (802.3af) - very good image quality - true day/night with IR and good WDR performance (color at day, but at night it can be B/W) - distance: 20 mts min - motion detection - alarms (e-mail, etc) - nice firmware and client support - IP66 certification (cameras will have to suffer with heavy rain sometimes and temperatures within -5ºC/40ºC range). - mobile app 1- Which are the most reliable brands in the market? I've heard about Sony, Axis, Bosch, Panasonic, Mobotix, but I'm no expert in the matter. Can you point me to some cameras of the best available brands within the $300-$500 range (even if not from the above brands)? 2- The option for dome or bullet is purely client's taste? Or it's for disguise and/or PTZ needs? 3- It is a good practice to buy a NVR from the same brand as the cameras? Or it can be another brand if it is ONVIF compatible? Can you advice I still don´t know the budget available for this project, so maybe things could not be as good as I would like to, but is always nice to have a perspective. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your considerations MaxIcon. I think I'd rather go for external IR and use cameras (dome preferably) with night mode, if does not exceed the budget by much. It seems a more reliable (and clean!) choice. Maybe in some important areas they will put a low energy light also, instead of IR illuminators. I will know only when the project starts. My experience with software is with Nuuo (version 3.2.2.0, now it's in v5.0) that came for free with a rack computer (scb5004) with a analog DVR card (4ch from hikvision i think). It's a nice software with many features, but the GUI should be more polite and unified (it has 3 different apps to manage, view recordings and remote desktop). Maybe now it changed, i don't know. I've heard good things about Milestone Xprotect also. I have to search a bit more on this side. Regards.

Thanks buellwinkle for the detailed answers. Thanks maxicon too. I know it's better to stick with known brands with good support. I will do my best to stick to a known brand within the available budget. But I still have some more questions: 2- I've read somewhere that IR is prone to insects/bugs at night difficulting camera vision. Is it advisable to use separate IR illuminators and outdoor cameras without IR? I would want to go for dome cameras (which already suffer IR bleeding). 3- When I talked about NVR I was asking advice on NVR software. Like buellwinkle advised I was thinking of buying a dell/hp server with raid and some disks and put a good NVR software on it. Maybe at this time, if money is a problem, I'll stick with software from the camera manufacturers. But I am asking for good NVR software to manage cameras from different brands (don't know if in the future will buy other camera brands). Good software includes nice alarmistics, storage saver, fine web and mobile clients, and so on. Hope this thread helps other people with the same questions. Feel free to add your questions here.

Hi. I am interested in designing some cctv projects, so I hope to get valuable info here. I've already installed a small system with 3 cams but now I would want to start bigger projects. Regards.