My 2 cents on ISC West 2006

[joe4 0]

I went to my first conference. It was fun and found some stuff I can use. It was hard to find anything truly different most was just DVR and Cameras.

 

I enjoyed talking with professionals (I am not) about IP vs. Analog. This is how most went.

 

Me: Why do I want IP?

Pro: You only need to pull one cable and use poe

Me: I pull Siamese

 

Pro: Infrastructure already exists

Me: I would only run IP on its own network separate from voice and data.

Pro: Why?

Me: Bandwidth, QOS, If one network goes down the others still work. Most business would care more that bank transactions are being processed instead of the video being captured.

 

Pro:Puts processing power at the device.

Me: We can all get cheap good power from Dell 

 

The classes I did on Thursday where a waste of time. The geovision one was a joke, only about 25 minutes long and was on the level to teach a 12 year old about a DVR.

 

I went to a class about a Hospital that converted to IP and saved tons of money this was a bigger joke, the money was saved because a in-house guy pulled the cat5 and they used the existing network. They did not calculate the lose of network bandwidth or use of the equipment. THAT IS CRAZY if someone said I need 10 % of your network I would calculate the cost and consider that in the price. I would image the hospital has at least a 6 figure network and 10 percent is going to a big chunk of change.

 

 

I am from IT and new to CCTV, we both have some preconceived notions about each other. The CCTV guys keep saying get IT involved and they run the network and all devices on it. Being form IT I would tell the CCTV guy he cannot use anything of mine, if he wants IP make his own network and run it separate. I would also expect them to be able to this without any of my departments help. I do not see any reason to work together, keep security separate.

 

Overall I will go again but they will never get my money for a class.

[rory 0]

Good feedback, and I totally agree with the last part (well all of it too) .. if they cant do the IT though they can always sub it out .. sorry i missed it ..

[Thomas 0]

There is a lot of bad info put out by the IP people and some info that simply is....poorly understood.

 

There is some advantage to putting some processing power on the camera. The CCTV world does it now with PTZs. Privacy masks, auto tracking, even PTZ functions. (Remember that RS-485 was first a computer networking method before Cat5 or even Co-ax.) If I put some processing power at the camera level then I can do some neat tricks. Toshiba's IK-WB02A has an SD slot. It can do motion detection at the camera. It's not as good as DVR but it can be a selling point by the use of redunancy. IF the DVR fails, then the camera still records.

 

Redunancy can but useful in larger jobs as well with IP. Imagine an IP system that feeds to two seperate IP DVR's and an analog one....without splitting the signal. If the network does down, the Analog DVR is okay. If either of the IP systems fails then you still have two differant types of systems recording it. Some idiot puts a nail through the Co-ax? The IP DVR is still working. I can move the second server off-site. If someone blows up the building, I have video.

 

I'm not saying that Analog is dead, and that IP is the way of the future. But it does offer some intresting potential. The most successful dealers I've worked with understand both worlds, either coming from the IP world and spending the effort to learn CCTV and the old school guys who learned networking. Even if they don't us IP based cameras, the ability to talk to the IT departments is key for larger jobs.

[MrSquid 0]

Newb question here:

 

Can an analog system handle newer 2 & 3 megapixel camera's?

 

If not, that is the only real reason I can see for going to an IP based solution. Then again I am a newb so what do I know.

[Thomas 0]

Yes and no. There are limits to what the capture card can see (there are only 500 vertical lines in the NTSC standard, some of which are for SAP, closed captioning, etc.) but you can still do some neat tricks with the streams. Covi does an analog camera that has three out puts. One is a downsampled "main view". The others are zoomed in views taking advantage of the megapixel image. The DVR see's it as three cameras. It's nice for some apps, too expensive for some others. At the same time it is a trick an analog company learned from the IP world.

[normicgander 0]

You all make some great points as usual .

 

Thomas- Sorry I missed you. The folks at your booth said you had already left. Maybe next time.

 

I very much enjoyed the show. I really needed Tuesday for the exhibits. I plain ran out of time.

 

Other comments:

 

The intersting thing for me was looking and using the remote viewing software. Overall, the GUIs seem to be improving industry wide.

 

Crest Electronics have some nice DVRs and an easy to use GUI.

 

Telexper had an intersting GUI layout for their XP embedded DVR. It had maps you could pull up of multi-sites etc.

 

The Mobotix mega pixel IP cameras were very impressive. But I called them and told me you need to sell $50K of product per year . I wish they had told me at the show instead of allowing me to jrool over their products. Oh well, they seem like great IP cameras for the high-volume dealers.

 

The VP of engineering for LuxRiot gave me a demo of their OEM software developed for Sanyo. Very cool- he displayed cameras from a Cheetah DVr and IP cameras from IQeye and a few others. Sanyo will be calling it their NVR software system to be released soon.

 

Many companies use low-grade LCDs which rendered awful pictures. Also, surprisingly many companies had their systems recording and steaming in lower pictures quality modes.

 

Rory- only a few WDR mini dome cameras. I was expecting many more...

 

Got to meet CCTVqueen and G-men Nice folks!

 

My wife won an I Pod.

 

Cheers

[rory 0]

Sounds like alot of flashy looking hardware and shabby video quality?

[joe4 0]

I thought it was crazy that alot the demo setups looked out of focus. I think they had the VP of sales doing installs, I would have my best tech there to do the setup.

 

I also saw a rack that was wired nice and neat, must have had 30U of gear in it then they toped it off with a good ol $49.99 linksys router just laying ontop.

 

I aggree with Thomas, IP has its place. The geo people talked about ATM's as a good place for IP,where haveing a DVR would increase the cost vs. alot of locations useing ip and a central DVR.

 

The smoke room was very cool, I would like to rig one to my car.

www.robberstopper.com

 

Geo had a DVR with xp embeded that was the size of a VCR doing 8 channels. I have never seen that before.

 

The electronic locks that did not reqire power was also cool. They even showed me how to program the key via the internet on her PDA useing IR.

[kandcorp 0]

 

The smoke room was very cool, I would like to rig one to my car.

www.robberstopper.com