In our fortunately limited experience with VCL we have found them nothing but totally incompetent and utterly useless. I remember the last time we had to use them, both the units they sent out to us (simple switchers) were both faulty. Ended up sending them back and fitting something decent in the end.

In our view VCL is very much the bottom end of the market, we stick with Panasonic, least we have backup from a non tin pot outfit.

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VCL now owned by Honeywell, I believe.

Have to agree with you with regards Panasonic. I find their domes and DVR's good for quality and function.

Yes, they have also aquired Ultrack and Silent Witness. This, I can only see as a bad thing. Each Co. used to specialise in their own equipment. Now Honeywell are involved, unless they work closely with the original technical staff, I can't see the quality of equipment or service improving.

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Just for you Jef

I'm off out to get a life now

Well, what else is there to do on a Sunday afternoon.....

I have fitted hundreds of VCL domes in a certain Very large High Street Supermarket over the last 2 years and i can honestly say ive never had a faulty piece of kit yet.

I find it very good quality, extreamly simple to install and use although i dont do any service work so dont know how reliable it has been. I would say this certain Supermarket Chain would'nt be using it if it were unreliable. They also use Silent Witness cameras, again an excellent piece of kit, Intellex DVR's (which i have had duff at start up) amd are now using VideoBloxs.

I find the VCL kit seems to lose their presets a lot.

Also some models don't have DIP switch adressing and need the daft keyboard to set them up.

look here: www.dowshu.com

We have a couple of these recently installed. The quality of picture really is excellent. The functions, parameters, compatibility and ease of use is also top notch. I can't really comment on how reliable they are as they've not been in long, but I've just found out there's a problem on a 32 way unit that seems to be 'losing' a bank of 16 cameras, intermittently. they all come back after a reboot to the DVR. It may be nothing to do with the DVR, though.

If you don't mind Linux based units, I have a superb unit that we have been running in the office for a good year or two with no problems, and we also install these and rarely have problems. Do not know if I am clever enough to do this, but look at

/product.asp?ID=75[/url]

and see what you think. I can provide links to view live in you want.

Paul

So someone else is getting FAT (file allocation table) failure. What does this mean? In ley terms £500 and customers who have just splashed out £3k just over a year ago are looking to you for a good explanation

Jef

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Yep. Had this one recently. Just came back from repair this very morning. The manufacturer updated the software and replaced the hard drives. But theres no assurances that the same won't happen again. The customer the unit belonged to accused us of sabotaging the unit as it conked out about 2 days after a R/I.