Megapixel Cams

[Guest frosted]

yeah thats the kit i should be getting a demo on. (well the 3 meg ones) just a shame the kit is very expensive (although arguably no compred to panasion and sony equivilents).

A 5 meg camera will be bloody impressive however!

the high def resolution of this kit is very exiting imho. very much looking forward to the demo

[UltraHighResolution]

""Envisage is their supplier. although i think envisage is whacking on a piss take margin from what they buy them at i might add. however still lot better value than the brand u previously mentioned and on tech sheet at least seem good for 25+ fps which is the most important thing for the nichq market i think im going to target these at. still expensive kit however!""

Robin from Envisage here - sorry it has taken so long to get into this chat. I am pleased to say that Envisage are one of the few remaining distributors who are not ashamed to make a decent profit margin on high quality product. You will be pleased to know that we are expanding nicely, and that thanks to our profit margins our Sales and Technical Support are second to none amongst distribution. Please also remember that importing this type of product from the US attracts 14% duty and considerable transportation costs.

One other advantage of making a margin is that we are able to test the available equipment on the market. Being the distributors of SentryScope for EMEA we consider ourselves at "the" Megapixel Distributor. To date we have tested the top megapixel (normally 3) cameras from IQEye, Lumenera, Arecont, IPIX, EVS, Axis and GrandEye. I have to say that our overall impression of all of these products is that they could be useful for specific applications. They all do however lack several features that we have come to expect in professional quality CCTV which severely limit the applications. We have found that in general all of these cameras on highest frame rates and qualities exhibit (annacceptable) motion blur, Sensitivity is poor, Backlight compensation is primitive, basic features such as electronic shuttering and Gain control are missing. Most of these cameras do not have Back Focus (Arecont does but it is simply washers to use as spacers). Add to this the general arrogance of the Megapixel manufacturers ("Auto Iris is not neccessary with CMOS Chips") and then have a think about the bandwidth and storage implications. A 3MP camera running at 25 IPS runs at 48 Mbps and on a high picture quantity could be using 6 Mb per second (that is over 1/2Tb per day per camera). To date we have not found a decent NVR that can record quantities of these cameras consistently. This is exactly the reason why each SentryScope needs a dedicated Server (1.6 Tb and it lasts 2 weeks).

In short we believe that this segment of the market in the words of Grolsch 'Is not ready yet'. Arecont is the best of the bunch but is not suitable for all applications, we do carry loan units for people to try their specific applications and a full showroom for demonstraions.

Some news - Panasonic are about to release a 1.2MP 'proper' camera that looks pretty exciting, with their new NVR this should be one of the products to look out for at IFSEC (After you have checked out the new COLOUR SentryScope, SentryChroma). There are allegedly a 6MP Colour camera from FOR-A and an 11MP camera from Forensic Vision however we are unable to find an installation nor are we able to get hold of a demonstration unit for testing. If anyone has tried these products or has one I would be very interested in hearing from them.

If anyone would like to 'borrow' a camera or just have a chat I am sure you can find me on the internet.

PS If admin are reading this can they please remove the price indication earlier in this thread, this is a trade price and we have a strict policy of not putting any trade prices on the net, this allows the installer to make a decent margin also.

Sorted I THINK.?