Dvr Record/playback Resolution

[james.wilson]

IMO you need to spend at least a grand for a decent 8 channel machine with enough storage

qfa

[fozzies]

Second that

[Adi]

Would depend on the capture resolution of the encoder but IP does not follow the same rules as it does not need to conform to the PAL or NTSC standard. Makes you think though, all the fuss over 600TVL camera and now 700TVL and even 800TVL cameras are becoming more popular.

You will see a new breed of DVR shortly referred to as 960H, these DVRs go above D1 and can record upto 720TVL. Sounds good but prepare yourself for a another flood of marketing bull, I see 960H DVRs listed now and although they can record an additional 200TVL over D1, they have no additional power to deal with the extra resolution so static pictures will be better but images with a lot of movement could even be worse than their D1 counterpart.

H264 is an extremely complex compression with something like 12 different profiles but 3 main ones, Baseline, Main and High. The results between these profiles varies hugely but so does the cost of implementation, for example, Blu-ray is based on High but most DVRs (especially cheaper ones) use Baseline. Thats the simple version, it gets much more complex with versions within profiles, Mbps, etc. and thats without taking differences in how each manufacturer decides to apply the H264 tools available to them but the point is, two DVRs carring the a similar H264 label can be hugely different in performance and cost of manufacture.

Yes, I thought the same way at one point "the more you throw at it, the more you get out of it" but now believe its more down to poor or exaggerated specs. In other words, the higher the claimed TVL the closer to an actual 528TVL you should get (varies between manufacturers ofcourse). TVL is another minefield though, example: a D/N camera with say 600TVL in colour mode and 700TVL B/W mode, some manufacturers will call this a 600TVL camera, others will call it a 650TVL and others a 700TVL

I had noticed these new machines in our favourite box shifters catalogue.