buellwinkle

If I remember tonight, I'll point the camera that way and capture an image. Hardwire, that's a good difference. The question then becomes, do you spend the money to buy the better lens, or buy the better camera with a better lens already on it. I like those Acti cubes, good price point and interchangable lenses and fits in some outdoor housings.

Quite possibly, but a lens maker can make a lens to a different spec for an oem manufacturer. The lens in that link does not look anything like the Arecont branded lens I have.

Actually, that IR emmitter can project out about 50' with pretty good results, not to be compared with inexpensive eBay specials that do a about 20'. it's just that I pointed it to that chair and it adjusted exposure accordingly, when I shined it to the opposite end of our yard, 50' away, it lights that area up equally. There are sharpening settings to make the image sharper, of course at the expense of sharpening artifacts that I feel make for a nicer picture, but compromises facial recognition. So this is a customer choice. For example, I feel that out of the box, Mobotix has a ton of sharpening artifacts and had to soften the image to get better facial recognition. That being said, the lens is not great, certainly not what I get from cameras with a good CS mount lens or even the glued in lens a Mobotix M12 has. I believe it was hardwire that posted images from an Acti with a better lens installed made a significant difference in image quality, not to say the original image did not provide an adequate image. Also, I had it set to the widest angle image and that cause some lens distortions. When I permanently mount this camera, it will be about 10' further and I'll adjust the varifocal lens closer to the middle of it's range that should improve the image quality closer to it's sweet spot. The day/night filter's job is purely to provide an IR cut filter during daytime to provide for color accuracy. Without an IR filter, the green foliage in the sun may look pinkish brown to purple. What you probably mean about the sun shining in the camera is probably more of auto-iris feature that this camera does not have. This is not usually a huge issue outdoors as people mount cameras high pointed down to avoid sun.

Sure, but that's what you are up against. One person puts in his business and boasts to surrounding businesses about how wonderfull it is, it's got to impact the businesses only selling CCTV. That's why I believe that it's easier to convince them that a "high def" system is worth the extra money than trying to say my analogue D1 camera is better, because people are used to paying a premium for "high def" to the point that even Axis is calling their 1MP cameras "HD", why because people want "HD".

Yes, I got mine directly from China, takes about 10 days. The trick is to make sure you are getting genuine Foscam, the clones are not supported as well and the item and packaging is identical. You should try one out, they are cool little cameras with pan/tilt capability and IR LEDs on the indoor camera, ftp and smtp alerts with images, works well with all browsers, although I can't view it from my iPad but since I put my all my cameras on BlueIris ($50), I can see all my cameras collectively or one at a time on my iPad. One annoyance is that it doesn't have an IR filter, so some items will appear as the wrong color. Is it a toy, sure, compared to cameras costing 10-20x more, it may appear that way as much as my Smart Car may appear as a toy to someone driving a Hummer, but that's a story for another day. BUT, this doesn't mean that Foscam will work for this situation, it's futile to try and use a WiFi camera across an area that's 300m wide, that's just not going to happen, I can't get my Foscam to reliably connect 50' away from my router.

I have a new Arecont 4-10mm 1/2" sensor, f1.8 lens, specifically made by Arecont for Arecont megapixel cameras. It's yours for $100, shipped in the U.S. Let me know if you are interested.

Foscam is the best camera that $80 can buy. I have one (and one clone, you know you made it when people make clones of your already cheap products) and it works reasonably well, their support has been good. I rely on them to alert me if someone enters an home that's vacant, works really well for that. My biggest complaint with these cameras with IR LED, is when you use them during the day, it doesn't have an IR filter, so colors shift, sometimes a lot, like I had a black jacket that looked light blue on the camera, had to do double take. The night time IR LED's are very weak, maybe good for 2-3m at most. Hooking up all the Wifi cameras to you NVR is real easy, just plug the DVR to your router, let all the WiFi cameras connect in through the same router and it will all be on the same network, no problem. Then configure each camera.

I agree, that for most small business and homes, they see cameras at Costco with DVR for under $500 and they think it's great. I have a neighbor, put them in his shop and it works great. But there's people that want more.

The bigest issue you face is bandwidth unless you have a dedicated high speed circuit. You would know if you had such a circuit because the cost would be in the thousands. Do not try this with cable or dsl home service. Check out UStream.com. It's a service that you stream your camera to and people connect to UStream to see the live feed.

Jack, The problem with WiFi is that it will go 100m if you have line of sight. If you put impossible obsticles in the way, like walls, you may be lucky to traverse 2 walls and get adequate bandwidth, regardless of distance. You can amplify the signal to your hearts content, but it's not going to make a huge difference in the number of walls in can traverse. What you can do is setup repeaters and the camera should pickup the closest repeater. I've setup repeaters using DD-WRT software on common routers like Linksys WRT54 and many can be purchased on eBay for pretty cheap. You have to configure the router as a repeater and put one in between each set of walls between the camera and recording device. This creates sort of a WiFi grid. BUT, the best way is hardwired, like thewireguy says.

Originally I looked at the equivalent Vivotek, but the sample images looks too soft, not as much detail as the Acti, so while they provide more megapixels (2 vs. 1.3), I wasnt' sure that it was better. Also, they appear to run about $100 more. Also, according to a distributor I spoke to (who shall remain nameless), the quality control and consistancy from Vivotek is not as good as ACTi and I'm better off buying Acti. As for PoE switch costs, I use an inexpensive PoE switch, a Trendnet that runs about $60. I need a switch either way because I don't have enough ports on the dsl modem/router, so it's not huge expense to support 4 PoE cameras. I agree on Axis, if they made an outdoor PoE day/night camera with built in illuminators for the same price range, I would be all over it. But their new "HD" cameras like the M11 series, while very good and putting them in an outdoor housing is not an issue, are not day/night, no inputs for a motion detector. If you can have white light in your outdoor situation, that will work, but in a residential area, I can't light a house up like it's Christmas just to make a camera work. As for resolution, these days, when cell phone cameras have several megapixels, 12MP point & shoot cameras selling for $100-200, TV's are just about all HD, just about all my TV programming comes in HD and even that is starting to be old news and 3D is emerging, it's hard to convince me, if not many people that VGA or D1 is idealto invest in. All it usually takes is a side by side comparison.

Without going the direction of CCTV, what's a better priced camera with the same feature sets? I'm always looking for a better price point, but once you slip below $600, it's tough to get any outdoor day/night camera short of an eBay special made in Shenzhen China. These are the features I need for outdoors - 1. megapixel 2. ir cut filter 3. built in IR illuminators 4. outdoor camera IP66 5. vari-focal lens 6. external inputs As alternatives I did look at Panasonic 735a, about $100 more, limited pan/tilt, but no zoom or varifocal, no IR Cut filter, no illuminators. I also considered the Axis M1114, excellent day camera, and pretty well priced with a cheap housing, but still no IR Cut filter, no illuminators, no external inputs.

What happened to the price war? I wish I can get mine working right, if I did, I would get 2 more.

I like dell, setup hundreds of dell rack servers for years, but you are limited I believe to 6 3.5" drives which sometimes forces you into external storage which gets pricey. Have you considered Oralce servers? The reason I mention it is that they are a little more clever in design allowing 12 (3.5") to 24 (2.5") drives in a 2U rack mount server. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x86/sun-fire-x4270-m2-server-077279.html To me Dell & Oracle are the mid tier of the name brand server market and pretty comperable in price, performance, quality. You can run Oracle Solaris on them, but for the most part, I've generally run Linux on them.

For those that do end up with this camera, here's what I learned 1. focus and vari-focal controls are locked down, you use a thin screwdriver on the edge of the control to losen and tighten this This was smooth when losened, but had a little spring back to it, so it was not easy to set. 2. the ends on the power and ethernet cable do not fit through the hole provided and Acti's response was to cut the wire, feed it through and put the connect on again, hmm, poor design here. I should be able to swap cables without going through this. 3. The front lens does push back a little and may throw the focus off, some playing with it makes it work out. I'll post a full review on my blog when I'm done setting this up and satisfied that I've done all I can do with it.

I just got my Acti 1231 and had some questions that are not very clear in the manuals. Would appreciate help from folks that have this camera. 1. focus and vari-focal controls are really stiff, I'm afraid of damaging the camera, is this normal? Any tips? 2. the ends on the power and ethernet cable do not fit through the hole provided on the camera back. Any tricks on this? Will eventually use PoE, but for now, testing with the power supply. 3. when I focus the camera it looks fine, when I screw the front back on, it throws it off slightly.

I have to get this one working right first, then I may get more.

Is that a 75-79 Nova? That has to be a rare car. I haven't seen one in 20 years. Are you going to restore to it's original glory or make a hot-rod or bracket racer?

If chosing the right PC is hard, consider this, get the cheapest PC you can find, spending over $400 is a waste. Then get a really good monitor, maybe 30". Then get a camera system that does not need a PC, like Mobotix. These camera can write directly to a NAS. I use $169 1TB NAS drives, and put 2-3 camera per NAS or you can get a higher end NAS and have more cameras write to it. Since the computer is not doing the recording, you need not worry about PC or network capacity. To me, designing the proper network to manage these camera will be much harder than deciding on if you should get three inexpensive $2,000 servers, or one $6,000 server and the network will end up costing you more than the servers anyway.

Any decent 2 socket Intel xeon Nehalem processors, 6-8 1TB SAS drives with a raid controller and the most important, a 4 port ethernet card. Dell or Sun/Oracle are the low end, HP is the high end, most reliable. Sun/Oracle does make unique servers that allow more drives, like 16 which gets you away from external storage which is not as fast. The key thing is that you seperate the cameras out into 4 seperate networks, each one with a 16 port PoE managed switch. Link up the 4 networks into each ethernet port on the server. Don't know much about Sanyo, but on Mobotix, they provide a low resolution image to the software for multiple camera monitor, but record events in 3MP mode. If there's a way to do that with Sanyo, it would help reduce bandwidth.

When you have a camera outside like you want, it's ideal to have PIR motion detection, so I would recomend the M12D-SEC-DNIGHT, with the 22mm lens for both day and night. It's a funny looking camera, but it has PIR motion detection and 2 way audio that I don't beleive their domes do and it has a B&W night sensor that's awsome. The 120W porch light will be more than enough. Also Mobotix has good exposure control and seem to handle bad lighting better than other cameras I've used. I have a review on my blog if you want to see some images. Although Mobotix makes an awsome dome, the D12, I'm not a fan of domes, kinda has that commercial bank/supermarket/casino/mall security look. I prefer a box camera in an enclosure or an outdoor box like the Mobotix because it's more intimidating and security to me is as much about being a deterent as it is about surveillence. If you do go with a dome, the D12 can be ordered with the seperate day and night lenses, but like previously mentioned, it's a large dome.

There's sample images from some Acti cameras on the Sticky post and they look OK. Not as good as the best from Axis and better than the worst from Axis. I bought an Acti 1231 because I wanted the unique features it offered for the price but I haven't gotten it yet, probably hung up at customs. Don't count a vendor's free or pay software if there's a chance you'll mix brands later. There's some decent software in the under $100 per server price range that is worth looking at if price is a concern like Castlekeeper from 40thfloor, BlueIris Software & H264soft that support a wide array of cameras.

Absolutely, you just have to have camras that has this feature like Mobotix, IQinVision Pro and Vivotek. Doesn't help the OP because he chose Axis. You can FTP still images with Axis to a NAS that supports FTP, but it won't record video events. Video is overrated for me, I prefer still images, but most prefer video.

I have Slingbox that I use on my LAN via PowerLine adapaters for video and audio and it works fine so I'm not sure what's different in your requirements. Here's Slingbox competitors which may suit you better - LocationFree Player, a competing product line from Sony HDHomeRun, a competing product line from Silicon HAVA, a competing product line from Monsoon Dreambox, a competing product line from Dream Multimedia DBox2, a competing product

Just another way to help make Best Buy a few more bucks next time you buy a new TV and can't reuse those archaic HDMI cables. 3K must be in Indian Rupees which comes out to $64 USD. $50 for 50' cable is fair, my place sells them for $40, neener, neener, neener.