tleggette 0 Posted November 1, 2011 I have DVR 308 by Merit/Lilin. Read lots of stuff online about reviews and such about the various DVR's. I find that most have acceptable features to serve the retail consumer. Reliability is of course a given. Beyond that to me the most important performance issue is how it looks on live screen and on playback. Most cameras I have, be they 480TVL or 530TVL look great if you bypass the DVR and view directly on TV. The problem comes relative to the degradation when running through the DVR. My question then becomes, are there reviews sources online that simply look at dvr units that experience very little degradation of the live/recorded image when running through the DVR. All the features and bells and whistles mean nothing if the units don't pass muster on this issue. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ak357 0 Posted November 1, 2011 I have DVR 308 by Merit/Lilin. Read lots of stuff online about reviews and such about the various DVR's. I find that most have acceptable features to serve the retail consumer. Reliability is of course a given. Beyond that to me the most important performance issue is how it looks on live screen and on playback. Most cameras I have, be they 480TVL or 530TVL look great if you bypass the DVR and view directly on TV. The problem comes relative to the degradation when running through the DVR. My question then becomes, are there reviews sources online that simply look at dvr units that experience very little degradation of the live/recorded image when running through the DVR. All the features and bells and whistles mean nothing if the units don't pass muster on this issue. Forget DVR go with megapix No DVR on market will ever give you live view quality on playback unless u can find DVR which does not compress Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Soundy 1 Posted November 1, 2011 Live quality usually depends on whether the system is using hardware compression or overlay to display live, or if software compression is processing the video before it's re-rendered into a live display. The former will generally look better, but in most cases isn't terribly relevant since most of the time you're going to care more about the recorded video. As far as recorded quality, that will depend on a number of factors: resolution, codec type, compression level, and to some degree, framerate. The problem with "reviewing" these factors is that codec and compression/quality are all trade-offs and different settings will work better for different scenes. A review may look at a static scene with lots of soft shapes and declare that a certain codec on a certain DVR looks better, but someone else using that on a scene with lots of motion and sharp edges finds that it looks like crap and a different DVR using a different codec might look better for his needs. Also, there's a big trade-off with space usage and retention time: the higher the quality you record in, the more space it takes. Only you can decide whether that's an issue for you, but it is something you still need to consider. And BTW, the same trade-offs apply to megapixel: different codecs, different compressions for different uses... and the higher the quality, the more space it will take. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
