Quality of picture with Baluns

[Service Engineer]

but Planet are aiming more at the professional domestic market and I think there products are perfect for this

Quoted for agreement. I have System Q units still in operation which I installed in the late 90's that have never failed or even once received a complaint from any customer. And if the customers happy, then i'm happy.

Anyways back on the original subject of the baluns, I'm going to go with the planet ones, I will give a report on the picture quality and also the quality of the balun itself when its all in and working.

As for Baluns, They are simply used to balance the impedance of the feed line, no balun should have any effect on picture quality..If it does then it's faulty..

[UltraHighResolution]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Don't want to flog a dead horse here but I have just had 5 (top quality) DVRs returned as faulty. Interestingly I have been unable to recreate the faults over 2 weeks of abuse in our labs. Further digging revealed the use of CHEAP passive baluns (from what I can see COP, LJD and Planet all come from the same manufacturer). I obtained some of these baluns and did some tests myself. Over a 10m run I measured using an oscilloscope a 13% loss in video signal, over 100m 22%!!! This was against similar COAX runs. Also the colour burst was pratically non existant through the balun.

I would be interested in the views of a proper Video Signal Tecchie as to what the effect of this might be on a DVR?

I must add at this point that I have not had the opportunity to test NVT baluns against this.

[Guest Rockford]

Yup cat5 is way better than coax over distance, Black and White can go 500m without amplification and colour 300m.

The distance for Cat5 varies depending on what your sending over it. For Ethernet, its certified to 100M unrepeated. For RS485, about 1000M (I think I've heard -? Can't verify) for video, I've not a clue!

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Don't want to flog a dead horse here but I have just had 5 (top quality) DVRs returned as faulty. Interestingly I have been unable to recreate the faults over 2 weeks of abuse in our labs. Further digging revealed the use of CHEAP passive baluns (from what I can see COP, LJD and Planet all come from the same manufacturer). I obtained some of these baluns and did some tests myself. Over a 10m run I measured using an oscilloscope a 13% loss in video signal, over 100m 22%!!! This was against similar COAX runs. Also the colour burst was pratically non existant through the balun.

I would be interested in the views of a proper Video Signal Tecchie as to what the effect of this might be on a DVR?

I must add at this point that I have not had the opportunity to test NVT baluns against this.

I know something about video decoding / encoding... Video signal loss definately DOES have a negative effect on encoded video... There are some DVRs which have circuits to "clean up" the signal before its passed to the decoder chips. If the chips get a bad video signal, usually you just get a bad pic or sometimes (depending on the decoder chip itself) you get complete drop out for a second or two... If a switcher matrix is used (more sigs than decoders), what happens generally is that you get one signal bleeding in to another, so you get a frame or a second of video from another camera in the wrong place.