Soundy

Personally, I think you're getting riled up over nothing - if anything, the customer is something I would have joked about with the second-in-command (after moving out of earshot, of course)... you know, something like, "Yeah, and I bet his son is the cheapest around to fix my car, too." Besides, I see no problem talking about it with the owner's right-hand man - chances are he doesn't have any say in the final decision anyway, and if he does, he's probably equally unimpressed by the customer's rudeness. Frankly, if it was me, I'd probably be unimpressed as well by this "professional" guy having a tantrum over it and refusing to talk to me any more, too - that's just rude and condescending on your part.

Never mind ethical, I'd be worried about what's legal. On this side of the pond, putting a camera anywhere one would have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" - such as a washroom, change room, bedroom, etc. - IS simply illegal, let alone unethical. The person installing the camera could be charged, as well as the person who commissioned the installation. Screw the competitor - best to employ CYA practices.

So did you end up talking to the boss, or did you just leave at that point? Because that (leaving) would be the only REAL mistake. Seriously, how many times do you think this garage owner has been in the same position - trying to sell someone on his professional services only to have some backyard mechanic pipe up about how he can do the same work for a case of beer? And how many times do you think he's had the last laugh, having to clean up the "cheaper" guy's mess, and had it end up costing the customer more than it would have if he'd brought it to the shop in the first place? Heck, I can think of a few times I've had to pay a shop to clean up my own mistakes on my own cars - I'm a pretty fair backyard mechanic myself, but when you get your oil pan partially swapped in your driveway, only to find you don't have the facilities (hoist) or tools to finish the job, and have to have the car towed to a real mechanic's shop with all the parts in a box in the back... well, that's when you come to appreciate why it costs what it does to have a pro do the work. If this shop owner is a smart businessman, he's not going to simply jump at the first "my son is the cheapest installer ever!" that comes through the door... and if he does, well, he deserves exactly what he ends up with. I hope you stuck with it - as I say, the only REAL mistake would have been to bail at that point.

I suspect it will stick around as a niche product - it does have some features that would be beneficial in certain circumstances, such as zero latency between the time the camera sees it and the time you see it... and it transmits *uncompressed* 1080p video at some 3Gbps, making for extremely clean *live* images. But neither of these, IMO, have any particular benefit in 99% of installations - you still have to compress the video for storage, using the same codecs as you would for IP MP cameras, so while you do get spectacular live images, all else being equal, your recorded video will be indistinguishable from IP... and by its nature, the vast majority of surveillance video has "planned latency", meaning that it's not going to be watched until hours, days, or even weeks after an incident.. at that point, what's a few extra milliseconds?

Well again, that depends on the camera and NVR/VMS. Most commonly, it's used to trigger recording, or to start sending a stream to storage. It may also be used to send email/SMS alerts, or to trigger an alarm output, or any number of other things that the camera's manufacturer may program it to do.

Suggest this camera for excellent low-light performance: http://www.cnbusa.com/en/html/product/product.php?seqx_prod=1073 - they can be had for well under $200. Then add a motion-activated flood light or two - low power, 50W or so should suffice. Place it/them near the camera. This has three advantages: One, no glowing red LEDs; Two, white light gives you nice color images; Three, when someone is prowling around in the dark and a bright white light snaps on, the natural reaction is usually to look toward the source of the light - this means also looking right toward the camera.

Depends on the style of junction box... try an outdoor octagon or something: We just used Wiremold round boxes as mounts for Dahua 2MP domes:

Sure - you could use the alarm outputs to trigger the LED driver circuits. You could even have a separate LED for each camera.

How are you defining "intelligence"? "Intelligence at the edge", AFAIK, is just a buzzterm that generically means that the camera is doing all the motion/analytics/etc. processing; it doesn't necessarily define what it does or should do with the processed information afterward... which means the answer to all the rest of your questions is, "it depends".

Take a look at the Dahua ESIP-MP2-DM1 dome: 2MP/1080p, IP66-rated dome. Can record directly to internal micro-SD and/or FTP/NAS, based on motion, alarm input, or constant recording, and pretty decent (though not outstanding) night performance. Lists at $200 so you could spread several of them around. Here are a couple shots from a recent install I did with them:

I looked at their cameras, only saw ethernet cameras... no wifi You musta been looking in the wrong place: http://www.ubnt.com/airmax Ah, they don't. You'd need an NVR or hybrid system.

I've been using PTZ Controller for years - it's handy to have on my laptop for testing PTZs up-close. It's been mentioned here many times.

Somehow, I really doubt you'll talk "high end residential and small business" into shelling out for THE BEST THERE IS... well, maybe high-end residential, as long as that means people who have to decide whether to take the Ferrari or the Bugatti to work in the morning... but small business, in my experience, is usually even tighter of fist than most average homeowners. It can be tough getting them to shell out for a Costco package system.

Well, one of the premises is that it's an "easy drop-in high-def replacement for existing analog". When the HDcctv hype started ("HDcctv" being a self-proclaimed standards body attempting to take the HD-SDI broadcast standard and enforce compatibility across manufacturers), it was also claimed that it would be closer to analog's price point... but this was something like 3.5-4 years ago when IP megapixel was still a rich man's game. Seems like a winner idea... but of course, reality always intrudes on a good idea. Following some of the various discussions on LinkedIn, even the HDcctv manufacturers say that they have problems with a lot of existing RG-59 - the super-high-frequency signal is extremely sensitive to any kinds of defects in the cable and connectors, poor cable, bad connectors, etc. They all recommend new cabling for best results, which is kind of counter to the "drop-in upgrade" concept, and one company is now even selling "HDcctv certified BNC connectors".

You can take all the penicillin you want, you just can't get rid of me

I've only been working professionally in CCTV for about 8.5 years now, but I have experience in computers going back to the early 80s (Commodore 64, represent!), and electronics well before that, including training and many years' experience in live audio and studio recording, plus a short stint in car audio. And through all that, your above statement holds true for all of them: problems and issues related to one technology vs. some other are minuscule compared to just plain and simple bad connections. Really doesn't matter. I think it mostly comes down to which option fits your design and/or any existing cable. If there's already coax in place, then naturally it's better to make use of that and encode at the head-end. If there isn't, it may be more convenient to encode multiple cameras to a single IP stream and send them all over a single wire.

That with all-new cable, or over existing coax? Most reports so far is that SDI can be pretty fussy with existing cable. How is that "much cheaper?" A 16-channel Dahua NVR lists *retail* for $450... four 3MP TDN box cams for $500 each (with 3.8-13mm AI lens)... 8-port Netgear (four PoE) switch at $165... there's your four-channel, four-camera 1080p complete system a smidge over $2600... *RETAIL*. Replace those cameras with 2MP domes at $200 each, and the total cost *to the end user* is $1400... and you're getting 1080p@30fps on every channel. *AND* the room to add up to 12 more cameras. If I wanted to save even more, I could just throw SD cards in those cameras and let them record internally instead of having a separate recorder... or use any of a number of free or open-source NVR programs... or use other cameras that come with their own free NVR software... The HDcctv Alliance spouted for two years even before any product hit the market, how SDI was going to be so much cheaper than IP... it still doesn't even come close.

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Ah, so the video wire is existing, you just need to get power to the cameras? I don't know if I'd trust wallwarts in storage units anyway - too easy for a renter to say, "WTF is this??" and unplug it. How about an open-frame transformer with wire tails, placed in a NEMA enclosure, with the incoming and outgoing wires running through sealed glands?

How are you getting video from the cameras to the recorder? Why can't you just run power alongside video?

GbE vs 10/100 really isn't that big a cost difference anymore - most of the added cost is the PoE itself. The Cisco switches we use - eight 10/100 PoE and two GbE combo ports - retail right around $300.

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What installers DO consider is that IP can be every bit as reliable as analog. 90% of the failures I see are purely hardware related: hard drives are by far the most common thing to go, followed by the cameras themselves, then other components like power supplies. None of these have any relation to the transmission medium. Similarly, probably 75% of connectivity issues I see are simply poorly-terminated cables - again, not specific to the medium. It's just as easy to screw up a BNC connector as it is an RJ-45. Beyond that, it's mostly damaged cables and corroded connectors due to weather exposure. Neither system has any particular claim to greater reliability. OP already has - he's stated that none of his runs would be over 250'. I have systems that have been running on $60 5-port 10/100 switches for over four years; I've seen $1000 enterprise switches go up in smoke. Excessive cost is one of the greatest myths people still spread about IP systems. In over eight years in the industry, I've had exactly the same number of switches and DVR cards fail spontaneously (meaning, not killed by something like a power surge or lightning strike). No matter how cheap the analog camera, if the capture card is defective then the system is nothing.

This is an important distinction. There are a lot of cheap "IP cameras" out there that are low resolutions, usually marketed as "SD" (standard def), D1, or VGA (640x480). There are some benefits to them, as IP does give you more flexibility in wiring and system layout, but they won't typically give you any better picture than any other analog camera, and you do pay a premium (although as you've found, an all-IP setup does eliminate the need for capture hardware and ITS associated cost, so they do balance out a bit). Also, megapixel doesn't necessarily mean IP - there are a couple new standards on the market, one of them being based on SDI (serial digital interface) used in broadcast, to transmit uncompressed HD video over coax. However, current incarnations of HD-SDI/HDcctv are limited to 1080p (2MP), still cost the same as equivalent IP cameras, require their own special recorder or interface card, still require a home-run cable direct from each camera to the DVR, and despite claims, DO NOT necessarily work with "any" existing coax. On the whole, probably not worth worry about.

Don't have time to go into a lot of detail at the moment, but first thing I'd say is: go ahead and start wiring with Cat5e: you can use it for both IP and analog video, as well as almost anything else you'd want to run over it in the future (meaning, make sure to pull an extra wire or two with each run). While hardwired is always preferable, IP wireless is actually not that bad to work with, and is fairly cost-effective these days. That's the main thing. There ARE megapixel cams that do really well with low light, but they'll cost a pretty penny. Another option is to go NVR and in instances where an analog cam would be better, just add an IP encoder.