Rickd

the demo cam is an IQeye302 from IQinVision and the list is $1395 w/o lens www.iqeye.com it support CS and C mount lenses, so you can pick the lens and so the FOV. I think IQinVision offers a 2.6 mm ultra wide angle, but even that only covers 115 degrees. other lenses are available from other sources... iPIX offers a two camera system that covers 360 degrees, but it is expensive. most digital zoom solutions today are designed to cover 90 to 180 degrees. beyond that you get problems zooming much, because the cameras today don't have enough resolution. maybe soon. regarding grainy digital zoom, any digital zoom that has a capture resolution bigger than the viewing resolution has a period of relatively lossless zoom, no grain. the ratio between the capture resolution and the viewing resolution describes the zoom ratio in the nearly lossless area. if you're interested in the tech, this is using downsampling to resize the image, and good downsampling algorithms are nearly lossless. When the capture resolution (or the part of the image being displayed) is smaller than the viewing resolution, then a process called upsample is used. A single step in upsample is generally acceptable - but after that the picture degrades very fast. So the trick is to have a very large capture resolution, and right now the top mark is the IQeye302 and IQeye602 both with 2 megapixel resolution, or 1600 by 1200. With a viewing window of 320 by 240 and only allowing a single upsample step that provides a 10X zoom. Rickd

The higher the resolution the better the digital zoom. If you want to see digital zoom from the camera with the most resolution available today, visit http://cam1.iqeye.com With 2 megapixels this does pretty well in the zoom department. The lens is not wide angle on this example - but other than that it will give you a feel for what digital zoom can accomplish. This camerais fixed, no moving parts, so all pan tilt zoom is done in the interface. And no client software required, all http like you asked for... Rickd

I'm new to the forum, it's great to see these topics discussed. And here's my disclaimer - for the last 5 years I have worked for an IP camera mfg, IQinVision. Megapixel, and recently multimegapixel cameras. The posts claiming poor performance from the general IP cameras of years past is correct. If you have an IP based back-end for recording, (benefits well discussed in this thread) then you have an option of traditional CCTV cameras with an IP convertor or an IP camera. Generally, the CCTV cameras with a convertor do offer more choices and lower prices. That's why IQinVision focused on designing cameras that do things that CCTV can't. Recently introduced: the IQeye602 does 1.3 megapixel progressive images at 30 images per second, and 2.0 megapixel images at 20 images per second. 640X480 at 60 images per second. True day/night, with .5 lux performance. The IQeye3 was superseded with the new IQeye301 and 302. These cameras offers low light performance and digital pan tilt zoom, which is really neat. The camera is recording the whole field of view, while each user can pan tilt and zoom around in the image. If you have enough source resolution you can get reasonable zoom ratios before there is any quality degradation. Multiple users can be zoomed into different parts of the scene at the same time. Pan tilt zoom works in archived video too. This year IIPSEC (the UK IP video surveillance tradeshow) awarded IQinVision Best of Show Hardware for their camera's ability to record their own video on a normal corporate file server (via FTP). The reliability issue of recording on a PC with software is real - but recording to a highly reliable corporate server keeps the costs low and provides secure archival. Sorry for the commercial - you guys are asking great questions and there is a lack of info out there, so I thought I'd register and post one insider's viewpoint. IP cameras have to outperform CCTV cameras to make sense. And the total solutions have to be less expensive. And the installers and specifiers have to make money. (you won't find our products over distributed like some) Casinos, Homeland Security, Aerospace, Finance - anyone who wants state-of-the-art is using IQinVision. check them out in your explorations...