cctv_down_under

Had you tried the Wide Dynamic camera range from Ganz?

Thats a bit pricey, basically you can use your analogue cameras, as the only thing that makes recording digital is when it ends up on a hard drive, however some companies use proprietry cables for their cameras and some I have seen with power up the COAX but these are very rare. 1 ch recorders are pretty poor because you must feed it through another device either anolouge switcher or MUX or quad unit, you can by standalone devices that will do 100fps or more for 4 to 16 camera inputs for under $1500 Auatralian about $750 US and that is retail pricing.. If you use a single channel recorder then you will see eiother a switched image (and miss bits) a quad image (small images that cant be seen well) or slow images througha MUX , having an input for each camera is a must for good qulity recording. If its not fully digital and you runt hrough analogue why change?

I have tried both systems, the Geovision is hands down winner, however Tai labs is cheaper, 800-16 is 100FPS card and is a bit out dated now with GV900 and GV100 models coming out.. Geo is the best product I have dealt with, however their marketing tactics and support leave a lot to be desired.

Both the previous posts are correct however there are a few more things to consider, most of the stated frame rates by manufactorers are based on small image recordings, for example 400FPS Pal is real time recording when 16 cameras are connected @ 320x240 Resolution (PAL). howver 640x480 (PAL) would be about 75% of this figure, also the capacity of the FSB (Front Side Bus) of the motherboard and the capacity of the CPU make a big difference too, PC Based systems usually require a P4 with Hyperthreading to be able to achieve real time recording rates and the better the CPU the faster the rates that are recorded, some cards do MPEG4 compression on board then send ity down the bus and uncompress it again making the CPU not work so hard and therefore giving faster frame rates. There are a compnaies that state the frame rates as Totals instead of individual and there are some that measure in Fields instead of frames so BEWARE!!!

Dallmier Electronics from Germany make the best of the linux based DVR's but they do not sell the cards, well not that I am aware of. There is a big difference between embedded linux based DVR products and full operating linux products. The DVRS with the best features are all PC Based platforms because they offer the features of windows in the networking arena. however the Dallmier does do a full PAL or NTSC image recording making it one of the clearest recorded images but as is with all linux products it lacks a lot of features. May I ask why you are aftera Linux based card?