SyconsciousAu

Gday to all the gods of CCTV. . I am looking for an IR illuminator at present. In a perfect world I would be able to pony up the money for 100 watts of Bosch or Raytech goodness but my budget only extends to the cheaper Chinese offerings. . I have identified several different types of illuminator that I think will fit my requirement but what I consistently fail to find is any data on the real world performance of illuminators with megapixel IP cameras. Most of the time the manufacture does not tell you how they arrived at the figures they have and when they do the testing is usually done with a low res black and white 1/2" ccd camera with a minimum illumination that most megapixel IP offerings will never hope to match. I was hoping that the people who have been there and done that could post your results for my benefit and the benefit of all the other CCTV forums users. Illuminator Brand: Eg Scene IR Number of LED's and wattage: 12 x 2W LED 28 Watts Total draw Light Angle: eg 30 degrees Camera: Eg Dahua IPC-HF3500 Lens: Eg Fujinon 4-15.4mm F1.5 Shutter Speed: Additional Lighting available Range to Illuminated Object. Description/photos of results. Im currently looking at a 30 degree 12 x 2W led IR illuminator from Scene that will be paired with a Dahua IPC-HF3500 and a Fujinon DV3.8x4SR4A-SA1 4 to 15.2mm Day/Night 3.8x Optical Zoom Varifocal Lens at about 11mm to give me a 30 degree angle of view http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Scene-28W-IR-illuminator-Infrared-Lamp-invisible-IR-light-with-Aluminum-material-night-vision-light-sources/113605_604790569.html - Illuminator Here http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/970519-REG/fujinon_dv3_8x4sr4a_sa1_4_to_15_2mm.html - Lens Here . I want to be able to do Licence plate capture at 15m with it at 1/250 shutter speed. The same camera with the same lens manages a stationary plate capture at 35m using nothing but the rear plate lights on auto settings. There is a street light but it was 20m from the plate so didn't do much. . Do the gods think I am in the ball park?

You will never get plates at night unless you dedicate a camera to that role. I'm capturing plates at night using an old dahua with average low light performance (0.1 lux in B&W) and a sub $50 illuminator. Vehicle speed is about 50 - 70km/h and exposure time is 1/500 sec. You have also confused frame rate with exposure time. The best way to think about frame rate is that 30 frames per second is like 30 still shots per second. 1/30 sec in the theoretical maximum exposure time at that frame rate. You can still do 30 frames per second at 1/1000 or 1/2000 of a second and reduce motion blur. 1/1000 of a second at 50km/h means the vehicle is moving 13mm during the exposure. If the plate is moving directly towards or away from the camera that will create almost no blur. Remember blue increases with angle because the plate is moving laterally in the frame. The newer Hikvision cameras claim 0.001 lux minimum illumination which means you could increase the shutter speed for less motion blur or increase the distance of the shot from the camera/illuminator. If you do not run a high enough shutter speed the plate will appear as just a bright rectangle. All you will see in that shot is the plate and headlights/tail light. Your second camera does not need to run as high a shutter speed because a little more motion blur wont stop you identifying the vehicle type. Lower shutter means more light in the image, more detail, increased depth of field and sharpness.

Now now numb nuts play nice with the other forum members What he is trying to say is that those cheap surge protectors offer only the illusion of surge protection. You have to spend some decent money to get decent surge protection. You are more likely to get a surge coming from an external source like up your power or phone line than into external Cat-5 cables on your home. Spend your money on a decent UPS with surge protection. It will also keep your DVR/NVR running in a blackout. I had a really good lightning hit recently. Nothing was fried but I needed to rebuild one of the drives in my NVR because it corrupted some things. That was with a decent surge protection UPS in the middle.

Having looked at the specs on both I would probably spend the extra on the Hikvision. Larger sensor, slightly better resolution, better low light performance, on board IR, speaker and microphone. Worth the extra dollars for my purposes.

BW, The camera you speak of ("Hikvision 2032 mini bullet"), can it be connected through my router and to my computer via a Cat6 cable? Can I get some free/open-source software to record events? I assume there is no registration/account/internet-connection required to get permission to use/run the camera? (If there is, I'll walk away right now) I understand I can also find software that lets me view the camera from online (like from a cell phone)? I'd like to get a cheap little camera to watch my driveway. I notice there is a 2032 camrea on Amazon: Here for $93. It's a 4mm lens I think, but can I put another lens (like 1 12mm) on it (is it a "CS" lens)? Thank you. Sincerely, IM Sorry to break this to you but Carl, aka Buellwinkel, died suddenly at the end of March. In his spirit the answers to your questions are as follows. Yes but unless you have a POE router you will need a separate 12V power supply. yes http://listoffreeware.com/list-of-best-free-cctv-security-surveillance-software/ No but you will need an internet connection to remote view from off site. Yes. Some "free" software charges for this functionality but with only one camera you can also log into the individual camera and view it by it's web interface.

Unfortunately DNA sampling for stalking matters is well beyond the resources of many small Police Forces in the US. Even if they had the money, her ex would need to have a comparison sample on file. Skindeles have you considered something like a motion activated nanny cam?

Don't know a great deal about them. I saw them when I was wandering the web one day. When you mentioned you were after a reasonably priced fisheye they came to mind. Can you link to the axis? I might look into them myself.

http://hikvision.msk.ru/download/ManualEng/iVMS/EN_Spec_of_iVMS-4200_PCNVR.pdf See page 2 for recommended configurations If you run one of the newer I7 processors at say 4GHZ and more ram that should give you heaps of headroom

I have two of the Hikvision DS-2CD3332-I with 4mm lenses. They do very well but the claimed 30m IR does not translate into the real world. 15m of IR with the 4mm lens is realistic. You may get further with the 6mm lens. I like them because they perform well and were cheap at under $US100. I also have an older dahua box camera with a 15mm lens supported by a $40 IR illuminator that performs well at 35m from the camera. It has fairly poor low light performance though so any of the newer cameras should perform better. I built an I3 Quad Core based box and it is currently running 2 cams at 5MP 8FPS and 5 at 3MP 15 FPS, displaying 4, and recording direct to disk. It runs at 75% CPU load. An I7 would give you heaps of headroom on a 4 x 3MP cam setup.

I use an online depth of field calculator to get some rough figures for my camera's/lenses http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html I work on the assumption that fixed lenses are focused on the hyper focal distance and have the maximium F-stop as described in their specs.. For a 12mm lens on a 1/3 sensor at F2.0 the near distance is 3.28m so your subject would be in focus.

I was a complete stranger to the man but he gave up his time to give me advice, as he did to many posters in this forum and at his blog.

No baluns required. POE means power and data over a single cable. The extra connector is there to run 12V if you are not using a POE switch. That's fairly close to the minimum requirementsof BI and whilst it might do the trick with direct to disk recording, no camera's being displayed, and potentially reduced frame rate/ bitrate / resolution, you may be disappointed with the results. Because you want this to create usable evidence I don't suggest even considering doing this on the cheap and using the funds you have available to create the best possible system. You also need to consider how you are going to capture that evidence. An overview shot may not be of sufficient resolution to use as identification evidence in court. The Australian Standard calls for 352 pixels per metre for identification. With the linked DS-2CD3332-I 3MP Cameras with the standard 4mm lens you wont get that until they get to 3.66m (12ft) from the camera. Someone throwing a rock through your window may never get that close to the camera. Going to a longer lens gives you that resolution further away from the camera but narrows your field of view. A 12mm lens on that camera will give you 352ppm at around 11m (35 ft) but your field of view is down to 30 degrees. Obviously it isn't realistic to put lots of narrow view camera's on your holiday house but if you put a longer lens covering a choke point like a door, gate or driveway where people are forced/more likely to pass through combined with wider lenses giving you an overview of the action then you can tell the story to the court.

You could get something like 4 DS-2CD3332-I 3MP Cameras (never hurts to have an extra camera) which have excellent night vision on them, and an 8 Port POE switch (leaves room for expansion if you desire), for under US$500 which would leave you US$1000 to build your NVR plus get cables etc. I've just had a quick look at your local prices online and you could build a very robust and redundant Blue Iris based NVR with about 4 months worth of storage for that price.

I use Blue Iris on a PC based NVR. I find it really flexible when it comes to adjusting the sensitivity. I can see the bugs flying around in my cameras with IR on board and they don't set off the recording.

Your Domain Name Server is the same as your gateway. Try changing that to your ISP's DNS or use google DNS 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 Also ensure your router is forwarding port 8080 to 192.168.0.102

Pretty much. We don't really need top of the line, just something that will allow us to have a bit higher quality in some areas. I'm sure we could go a bit over $1000 for the DVR if there is a considerable jump in quality. To quote Darryl Kerrigan. "Tell him he's dreamin son." My home system DVR cost more than that.

You haven't got the cable running parallel to any power or near fluorescent light fittings have you? . I've never heard of the brand

Hikvision makes a 3mp and 6mp fisheye that go for under US$600 a pop. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hikvision-DS-2CD6362F-IS-6MP-360-Degree-panoramic-view-IP-Fisheye-Camera/1877678445.html

Nothing at all in those other tabs that gives you any clues? It looks fairly generic. You could always search on ebay for a similar looking card and then google the drivers to see if that works too.

No I was definitely talking about that camera. The Bosch gets the win in colour but the Hikvision seems to work in half the illumination of the Bosch in B&W. That's on paper though. Id love to see them side by side in a head to head test. DS-2CD4065F-AP Camera Image Sensor: 1/1.8" Progressive Scan CMOS Signal System: PAL/NTSC Min. Illumination: Color: 0.02 Lux @ (F1.2, AGC ON) B/W: 0.001 Lux @ (F1.2, AGC ON) Shutter time: 1 s to 1/100,000 s Lens Mount: C/CS mount Auto Iris: DC drive Day& Night: IR cut filter with auto switch Wide Dynamic Range: Digital WDR Digital noise reduction: 3D DNR Focus: ABF(-A model) Dinion 8000 Power Power Supply 12 VDC Power-over-Ethernet 48 VDC nominal Current Consumption 750 mA (12 VDC)200 mA (PoE 48 VDC) Power Consumption 9 W PoE IEEE 802.3af (802.3at Type 1) Class 3 Sensor Type 1/1.8” CMOS Total sensor pixels 6.1 MP Video performance ‑ Dynamic range 5MP (4:3) mode 97 dB WDR(97+16 dB with iAE) 5MP (16:9) mode 97 dB WDR(97+16 dB with iAE) 1080p mode 103 dB WDR(103+16 dB with iAE) Video performance – Sensitivity(3200K, 89% reflectivity, 30% IRE, F1.2) Color 5MP mode 0.0121 lx Color 1080p mode 0.00825 lx Mono 5MP mode 0.004 lx Mono 1080p mode 0.00275 lx US$580 on Aliexpress I have seen the Darkfighter you are talking about. It also has some very impressive paper specs on it. I've seen them for US$700 delivered to Australia. Matching Hikvision lenses are going for around US$160. So fairly close to the $1K figure you quoted when a housing is thrown in. A review on one of them side by side with a Bosch Starlight would be good too.

Have you got a windows based PC with a spare PCI express slot hanging around? If so install it and see if the PC recognises it and installs drivers automatically. Even if it doesn't, you may still be able to get some information about the card that will tell you where to look for the drivers.

Id be interested in seeing a review of the Hikvision DS-2CD4065F-AP. It seems to be claiming better low light performance than the Bosch Dinion 8000 Starlight, and at under US$650 delivered they are at a fairly attractive price point too.

I've been doing some testing and tweaking today and I don't think that 1/200 sec exposure would give clear images over about 20kph, especially if there is any sort of offset between the camera and the moving vehicle. I've found that even with a 1/500 second exposure there is noticeable motion blur as the speeds increase. This is a capture of a vehicle doing about 20km/h This guy was doing 60-70 km/h A human can still read the plate but number plate recognition would be fairly tough I think.

You need to set up port forwarding in your router. For example if your DVR is 192.168.0.2 you set up a port forward on port 10000 for arguments sake to forward requests on that port to 192.168.0.2. The address you type into the web browser/phone would look something like this 123.456.789.012:10000. Simply having an open port is not enough. that port must forward requests to the DVR. If you google how to set up port forwarding for your router there could be a youtube tutorial on it.

I'm not sure what you are getting at. Your ISP will either assign you a static IP or a dynamic depending on the plan you have. Many plans come with a static IP these days. If you have a dynamic IP then you will need to register for a Dynamic DNS service. If you are talking about giving the DVR a static IP on your local network, such as 192.168.0.100, you can set that all up in your router menu. You will then need to set up port forwarding in your modem to forward outside requests to the DVR for remote viewing applications. Make sure that you have changed all of your passwords from their default before doing that.