Sawbones

Excellent article, Amir.

Here's a night-time 1.3Mp image from an Acti-ACM-1231:

This is true. Try it from work, or a neighbor's house. Your ISP may also be blocking incoming port 80 requests to keep you from running servers on your home connection... some do that on residential connections.

Mobotix makes some nice cameras... and dual-imager seems to be one of the better ways to really optimize day/night performance (I'm using panasonic day/night domes on my home and they have pretty good performance, but they're not megapixel, and don't have nearly the features of the Mobotix... though they're 1/3 the price). I'm seriously considering adding a Mobotix camera in place of an extisting PTZ-mini-dome, but haven't pulled the trigger on that decision yet. I don't know how well the Arecont dual-imagers perform... I've not looked into them due to having to buy an enclosure in addition to the camera, and I've found very few enclosures that I'd consider even remotely aesthetically-pleasing. At least the Mobotix is self-contained and weatherproof right from the start. As for whether you should do analog in addition to the IP cams... you certainly could, but the performance compared to anything IP/megapixel isn't going to be even close. I have a mixture of analog and IP-based on my home, but the analog cameras are attached to camera servers (Axis 241Q x 2), allowing me to go with a fully IP/PC-based system. My analog cameras cover general areas, and the megapixel IP-based stuff is for areas where I want detail and/or face shots. Going PC-based also gives you a large selection of hardware, which you can replace and/or beef-up depending on what kind of additional features you want, or what kind of frame-rates you hope to capture. Storage is cheap, and going with an NAS solution in addition to your NVR box is a nice option for archiving (I'm partial to the Netgear NAS appliances... they'll take up to four drives and have gigabit ethernet). Sounds like you have made some good selections... but take this bit of advice: build in plenty of upgrade room and excess capacity. Once you get bitten by the CCTV bug, you'll find yourself coming up with all sorts of additional things you want to do/add. Take my word for it.

I have the standard lens that came with the dome... works just fine day or night.

The lens itself needs to be day/night, but it's the imager itself that's IR-sensitive. Unfortunately, I don't recall the exact lenses I have on my pano domes.

If your physician friend wants visible cameras, see if you can talk him into some fixed vandal-proof domes. They'll be visible that way, but more resistant to some of the vandalism that visible cameras occasionally attract. Visible cameras are great deterrence, but the downside of drawing attention is that some people will try to screw with your hardware. Bullet cameras are cheap, but you can see which direction they're looking, they're easy to divert to a non-functional view (just turn it to face the wall), and integrated IR attracts bugs, effectively screwing up any motion detection you might want to use. I did the integrated-IR-bullet route initially, but subsequently converted to domes with separate illuminators. I'm much happier with what I have now. Here is a picture with an integrated-IR dome... note the hot-spot in the center: Here is a picture with a regular Honeywell dome, and the illumination provided by a separate illuminator: Here's what the install looks like in the daytime: You're generally much better off going with dome cameras and separate illuminators, preferably conventional, flood lights. Visible light gives higher-quality pictures compared to IR, and they're in color, which aids in identifying trouble-makers, colors of vehicles, etc. If you're going for face-shots of people, you're going to need something much closer than a parking-lot view; perhaps a camera over the front door.

The surface-mount-dome Panos are great cameras, and you'll save money over buying the regular camera + enclosure. The Panos are tough, and have a built-in dehumidifier element. They also have an optional heater, though that requires 24V to the camera instead of the conventional 12V. The domes are true day-night cameras, with an IR-cut filter. They're also Wide Dynamic Range, and provide excellent images. They have no built-in IR (this is a good thing), and you'll need some external illuminators or regular ambient light to give the best pictures. Increasing your ambient light is the best route, since you'll get better images. IR will give you pictures, but only in B&W, and they'll be granier than daytime. I have several of the WV-CW484S cameras mounted, and I have a couple of example images for you to compare. The first is with an IR-integrated armored dome, and the second is a WV-CW484S with an external illuminator: Not only does the Pano give you a better picture, but separating the IR from the camera keeps the camera covert at night (no visible LEDs to draw your eye), and prevents IR-attracted bugs from tripping your motion detection. It only takes a couple of persistent moths to fill up your hard drive with garbage images.

u probably meant to say 4.5 W ? PoE can go up to about 15.4W Did I miss a decimal point? That's embarrassing...

They're right... I think you can only get about 45W out of PoE... that's not nearly enough for a decent illuminator.

Ahhh... those were the days. I'm of the firm opinion that the tape drive on my Commodore Vic-20 was the slowest thing ever invented. The dawn of the computer age.

Very glad to hear you had a great experience with Shoreview. If you're not a hard-core geek, it's very helpful to have somebody to show you the ropes with this stuff. Just last week I took out my embedded DVR and put everything on an IP-based system (I've redone my own system several times now), and I've had an easier time with the IP-based stuff, simply because I'm a computer and networking geek, and have played with computers since the TRS-80 days. There's nothing quite like the peace of mind of knowing what's going at home while you're away. Sounds like you're a convert.

Ah... I see what you mean. Yes... with protocol overhead and such, you're really only going to get 70-80Mbps out of a 100Mb switch. You can get significantly more out of a gigabit switch, but then you get into jumbo frames and other peculiarities that you need to really optimize a gigabit switch's capability. You also need high-quality network cards... generic chipsets sometimes leave a lot to be desired. I lean towards the Intel Pro 1000Mb cards... always had good luck with them.

BTW, that Netgear PoE switch I mentioned up-thread works just fine. I posted a picture from a PoE ACM-1231 camera in one of the ACTi threads... no issues at all.

You're right about that... I found the price point so tempting that I bought that exact camera last week (Acti ACM-1231), and just got it up and installed today. It replaced a Speco Intensifier bullet (the last one in my installation). Here's two night-time images to give you an idea of the difference. The Intensifier image is from last night, recorded through my Dedicated Micros DS2, and the Acti image is from tonight, taken as a screen-shot straight off the camera. These were taken with identical lighting conditions. I'd say that's some difference. The Acti works better with moving objects too... the Speco Intensifier slowed down the shutter speed so much that it made virtually everything an unrecognizable blur.

aha... very good. Don't they get about $150 per channel for the VMS software? What's the rough cost of that update package relative to the cost of the initial software purchase?

So you get updates for a year... does Exacq have any sort of a service package deal you can buy to get updates a year or two down the line? It would be prohibitively expensive to have to re-buy the entire package just to get updates every year.

My experience with rack-mounted equipment is that they rarely pay any attention to how much noise the item produces. They figure it's going into a rack in a datacenter or wiring closet somewhere, so they put these tiny 40mm fans in them... and they're literally like sitting next to a hair dryer. My current rack-mount switch (a 16-port Linksys managed Gigabit switch) was horrendous... bad enough that I took it out of the rack, took it completely apart, removed the two tiny noisemakers-disguised-as-fans that they'd installed, used an 80mm hole saw to cut a hole in the top of the casing, and installed a low-profile 80mm fan+grill (just enough clearance that it didn't hit any of the internal components. The result? Ultra-quiet, and it moves more air through that switch than those tiny little fans ever did. The only downside? I voided the warranty.

I just bought a Netgear switch that has four 10/100 ports, and four 10/100PoE ports (total of eight) for a hybrid system (two axis camera servers and a couple of IP cameras). It's this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122152 They seem to be out of stock at the moment, but I'll try to post back when I've got everything hooked up.

That's actually quite an important point. I have some military-grade IR illuminators that require mounting, such that nobody's face can be within 3-4 feet of the illuminator when operating. Your eye's iris will not constrict in reaction to the IR spectrum, and you can damage your retinas with very strong IR sources. It's a safety issue that's sometimes overlooked.

If you're running behind a half-way decent firewall (either PC-based, or appliance), you can simply pick a high random port number (30,000 or so) to forward to you DVR's web port (usually 80). That way, if some knucklehead is scanning your IP address, your firewall should drop his connection after a couple of port hits (and he's likely to be scanning the lower 1024 ports for common services anyway) Unless your antagonist has an infinite number of IP addresses to use, he'll probably move on to easier targets rather than continue to knock on your ports and get blacklisted by your firewall. If you want to get trick, you can implement port-knocking: http://www.portknocking.org/

I've called the company (very friendly folks) and they will let you download a fully functional demo (free for 1ch=). That's a nice option... thanks.

I've been looking for a demo of the exacq software myself. Let me know if you find one.

I have one of their 10x mini speed domes. It's a nice piece of kit, and pretty reliable. Never used any explosion-proof stuff.

Your IR is either not coming on, or something is seriously wrong with that camera. It looks like it's in B&W mode, so it's gone to the "night" setting, but I see no visible IR. A 125ft IR camera should be good to at least 60-70ft or so... you can basically cut the "effective" distance in half compared to the manufacturer's specs. Even so, there should be a large bloom of IR light on that sidewalk, and I'm not seeing it. If it's using the common CCTV near-IR spectrum of light, it'll be visible to the naked eye when it comes on... a dull reddish glow will be seen to be coming from the LEDs. If not, then that's your problem; it's either not coming on, or the IR is broken in that camera. If it's the latter, then you could leave the camera in place, and simply add an external illuminator, and that would be my recommendation. I've personally gone away from integrated IR for my cameras, and strictly use external illuminators... you just get better results.