CCTV 4 channel DVR card

[housty]

Hi all

Does anyone know if the DVR cards you get for your computer are any good?

Can you get realtime cards?

housty

[whistle]

No but i have seen them on EBay for as little as 99p. I might get one as for that price i can try it and bin it if its ****

[Guest bigbro]

They are utter ****, stick with geovision or something similar

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Hi all

Does anyone know if the DVR cards you get for your computer are any good?

Can you get realtime cards?

housty

There are hundreds of cards available and it would take up too much space to cover them all. An excellent mid cost card is from a company called DIGIFLOWER but you have to look them up on the web and contact direct in Korea. The absolute top of the tree is a card with the H264 algorithm. It has eight channels of video input and eight channels of lip-sync audio input and can deliver DVD quality. If you reduce it to four channels then it will deliver 4CIF resolution and near broadcast quality and - at all time can deliver 25 images per second on all channels at the same time. If you are selling to a customer then this is the absolute minimum you should sell. But if you want for your own PC and amusement then okay to buy any one of the massive load of rubbish available. If you are a serious installer and you want a DVR that will make you proud, give a good profit and make you the darling of the law enforcement world then you should choose an RTOS 16 channel video and lip-sync audio standalone machine using the H264 algorithm. It will hold ( you can put them in yourself ) either one DVD writer and four hard drives or no DVD writer and eight hard drives - any size and will also work with a remote NAS RAID ARRAY RAID 6 of any size. If you leave out the DVD writer you can use a stand alone writer and plug it in USB. If any of you want to go down the quality route then contact me at dvr@dsl.pipex. com and I will send you the data. If you want the full package I will need your snail mail address.

Why do I care> Because I am a Forensic Video Analyst for a Police Force and every day I have to throw away 80% of all material made on **** DVR's because the result is not good enough for evidential purposes.

Regards to all.

Lee Tracey

[Rich]

There are hundreds of cards available and it would take up too much space to cover them all. An excellent mid cost card is from a company called DIGIFLOWER but you have to look them up on the web and contact direct in Korea. The absolute top of the tree is a card with the H264 algorithm. It has eight channels of video input and eight channels of lip-sync audio input and can deliver DVD quality. If you reduce it to four channels then it will deliver 4CIF resolution and near broadcast quality and - at all time can deliver 25 images per second on all channels at the same time. If you are selling to a customer then this is the absolute minimum you should sell. But if you want for your own PC and amusement then okay to buy any one of the massive load of rubbish available. If you are a serious installer and you want a DVR that will make you proud, give a good profit and make you the darling of the law enforcement world then you should choose an RTOS 16 channel video and lip-sync audio standalone machine using the H264 algorithm. It will hold ( you can put them in yourself ) either one DVD writer and four hard drives or no DVD writer and eight hard drives - any size and will also work with a remote NAS RAID ARRAY RAID 6 of any size. If you leave out the DVD writer you can use a stand alone writer and plug it in USB. If any of you want to go down the quality route then contact me at dvr@dsl.pipex. com and I will send you the data. If you want the full package I will need your snail mail address.

Why do I care> Because I am a Forensic Video Analyst for a Police Force and every day I have to throw away 80% of all material made on **** DVR's because the result is not good enough for evidential purposes.

Regards to all.

Lee Tracey

Nice to have you on board Lee, seems you have a lot of info that will benefit many here, especially trade members, hope you stick about.

Regards

Rich

[ian.cant]

Why do I care> Because I am a Forensic Video Analyst for a Police Force and every day I have to throw away 80% of all material made on **** DVR's because the result is not good enough for evidential purposes.

Hi Lee, quite a statement there. Could you expand on the exact reasons or machines that cause this headache. Naturally noone would install such **** if they knew it was such a waste, too good an oppertunity to learn something here me thinks.

[Mavrick_001]

Waste of time, plus you need to leave ya pc on all the time... pants!!! Get a proper job!!

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Hi Lee, quite a statement there. Could you expand on the exact reasons or machines that cause this headache. Naturally noone would install such **** if they knew it was such a waste, too good an oppertunity to learn something here me thinks.

The problem is too complicated in technical detail for the space available here but in essence if we understand that a conventional 44 degree FOV lens on a 400 TV line camera transmitted to a DVR cannot decode a vehicle registration plate beyond eight metres but this camera is then fitted by a brilliant expert of an installer - probably Robin Hughes - at the top of a 12 metre pole. You will see where the problem starts.

The other day I received a visitor who gleefully told me he had solved the problem of the atrocious quality images he had been producing with his DVR. He told me he had purchased a new camera with claimed performance of 600 TV lines. This man, probably a relation of Robin Hughes, just sat there dumpfounded when I explained to him that he had wasted his money. The DVR he owned was only capable of resolving 136 TV lines so it did not matter if he fitted a £50,000 BBC studio camera the most he could ever get would be 136 TV lines. To illustrate the difference between the 80% of **** and what we really need I will prepare some comparison photographs and if the Webmaster allows I will put them up for viewing.

The biggest mistake made by so many installers when purchasing a DVR is that they believe what the salesman tells them and they believe what they see. Most DVR's are displayed to potential buyers with an image from the camera on LIVE display. This display is of no value and should be ignored. A simple test is to take a vehicle registration plate with you and put it about 10 metres from the lens of the CCTV camera and look at the analogue or RGB screen and in almost every case you will be able to read the registration plate number.

Fine. But totally useless. What you need to do is tell the salesman to now RECORD your registration plate and then playback the recording. Now see if you can read the plate from the recovered video from the hard drive. A tip to beat dishonest salesmen. When the plate is being recorded make a note of the time - minutes and second - and when you are offered the playback check that the display is showing the original time and not the current time. If it is showing the current time then you are still watching LIVE.

I run a number of computers ( PC's) and my main machines have been running non-stop for over a year ( would be longer but I change the motherboards every year ) and they are never switched off. I have a DVR that has worked for over seven years and has never been switched off. Switching PC's ON and OFF does a heep of damage and shortens their trouble free life by about 70%.

Lee Tracey

[ian.cant]

Thats a pretty specific example where the DVR wasnt **** as such, it was just the wrong kit being used for the wrong job, but i get your point. That is of assuming that the camera was purely there to record a number plate.

As an installer i find that most cameras are installed to give overviews of areas, very rare to be asked to provide a camera for a specific job (except coverts). Also a clients budget is rarely enough to cover the expectations which is probably the main reason why this happens, not so much the **** installer or **** kit. As you well know, you get what you pay for, this is what dictates usually i find.

Looking forward to more examples though, always good seek another viewpoint.

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Thats a pretty specific example where the DVR wasnt **** as such, it was just the wrong kit being used for the wrong job, but i get your point. That is of assuming that the camera was purely there to record a number plate.

As an installer i find that most cameras are installed to give overviews of areas, very rare to be asked to provide a camera for a specific job (except coverts). Also a clients budget is rarely enough to cover the expectations which is probably the main reason why this happens, not so much the **** installer or **** kit. As you well know, you get what you pay for, this is what dictates usually i find.

Looking forward to more examples though, always good seek another viewpoint.

You are absolutely right about getting what you pay for and I agree that this aspect is the major influence and I also agree that most systems are put in to give an overview. But stop to think for a minute. What use is an overview. I can illustrate this with another example. A highly successful software writing company had so much work it was using two shifts and consequently working through the night. It had a car park by the side of the building open to a major road and pavement. Just a gap to allow the employee cars through.

The local scumbags now had a new target of some twenty odd cars parked with easy access. This car park became a "store" for them to both break into the cars and also steal them. So the company installed CCTV and sure enough the overview CCTV recorded the scumbags car arriving and recorded the figures getting out and recorded the overview activity. The police were called. Next morning we examined the recorded footage of digital video stored on the hard drive.

The quality was so bad you could just make out the the brand of vehicle used by the scumbags but the quality was so bad it was impossible to obtain the numberplate or any special features. The quality was so bad that the figures getting out of the scumbag car and doing the scumbag business looked like stick images from a cartoon. The quality was so bad that you could not even make out what type of clothing they were wearing. Identification? Not a hope in a million years. Great overview though.

I asked the owner why he installed a CCTV system. His answer was that he was fed up with the scumbag attention and wanted evidence so that the police could identify the scumbags and arrest them. So I said to him okay! What is the make of car. He had no idea ( one of our expert Traffic Cops had identified the make though so we had got that far ) I then asked what the registration plate number was so that we could get a move going in that direction. He could not get the slightest idea from the images, even zoomed up for the zoom only produced pixels. I then asked him to tell me the name of one of the stick images. Obviously he could not. So I asked if thr stick image was a man or a woman. He could not tell. I then asked if the stick image was Black, White or Asian. He had no idea. I then asked him to describe the clothing they were wearing. He could not offer even a suggestion.

So I asked just what has this CCTV system told you?

He answered that it told him that his cars had been attacked last night.

I replied but you knew that last night when your employees came out to go home. Your own eyes gave you that information. Why have you spent thousands of pounds to discover what you already knew some ten hours earlier?

He replied - yes you are right I have wasted my money, this CCTV system is useless.

The total maximum information that the CCTV system gave us was that the scumbags were using a specific make and model of a specific car. That is of no use to the police and even if by some other means we managed to arrest the scumbags we could not prosecute them for this car park caper as they would deny it and we had zero evidence.

So yes the CCTV system did give an overview but an overview that does not provide detail is utterly and totally useless. The only reason that this CCTV system was installed was because the poor victim was led to believe that it would provide high enough quality and evidence that the scumbags could be identified or some aspect identified so that the police would be able to take action. Inmost cases where CCTV is involved it is an eye witness that provides the clue,not the CCTV. If you remove the CCTV systems put in for traffic or pedestrian management knowledge then the only and sole purpose of a CCTV system is to obtain evidence to assist the police - that is the answer given by the hundreds of purchasers of CCTV systems that I have interviewed. I have never found a different reason.

As over 80% of all CCTV systems fail to provide that evidence then they are not fit for the purpose. They are a waste of time, effort and money.

One Betting Shop Chain has woken up to this after being robbed so many times but the CCTV overview CCTV systems installed for them failed to provide evidential information even inside a betting shop. On our advice they installed more cameras but this time in a semi-concealed position close to the exit door. The act of exiting the premises brought the faces of the scumbags to within three feet of the camera lens.

Now we had the evidence and could make arrests and put the scumbags away. This time, because the two were being used together, the overview cameras told us how the action went down and exactly what happened but failed to provide any evidence identification - so the overview was now of value and the close quarter cameras gave us clear sharp images of scumbag faces.

The overview system of CCTV, without the additional close quarter camera is of little, if any, use.

It is not rocket science to analyse a proposed CCTV covered area to work out some key places were scumbags are likely to go. At these places put in concealed or semi-concealed cameras and these cameras may give you the power to identify the criminal and the overview then plays a useful back-up part. But overview on its own is a total waste of time.

In the war against terrorism we have a camera called the "GOLIATH". This camera observes a scene of 44 degrees FOV and records 25 images per second at **** quality - the usual PAL CCTV system quality from which we only get an OVERVIEW. BUT THIS OVERVIEW IS VALUABLE. Three times every second it also takes a 22 million pixel snapshot and processes both streams in digital format from camera through to recorder. The normal recording gives us the overview and when we see something of interest weswitch to the snapshot side. This snapshot can read a number plate and also the faces of the driver and front passenger at a range of 100 metres from the camera position but it only has a 44 degree FOV lens.

Unfortunately we are back to that old problem of cost. The Goliath is very expensive and that will keep it out of the commercial world for a long time but you can still emulate the Goliath by adding those extra cleverly sited cameras in addition to the overview cameras.

The next big headache for us after lack of quality is frame rate. We do not want any CCTV system to record at less than 16 images per second on every camera at the same time. We know that overview cameras fail to tell us anything. Another example:

A murder is committed and the murderer escapes in a vehicle and uses a back alley shaped like the letter C only more rectangular. A local business has a camera recording activity in this back alley, but overview only. His DVR only records 2 images per second. When we recover this video it shows only one full image of the murder vehicle while it is traveling at speed in the alley. But the quality is so poor even our experts are unsure of the make. Registration plate - you must be joking. So just one total **** image. We have no chance.

If however the DVR had been working at say 25 images per second we would have had over 25 images. Admittedly 25 **** images. But we have a software programme that is often successful in interpolating all the images and building one good image, sometimes even the reg plate. But it really needs 40 separate images to be 100% successful. So in addition to you giving us lousy quality you also give us lousy frame rate.

If your CCTV system is not helping the police combat crime then exactly what function is it performing?

So you think it is a deterrent to crime. You must be joking again. I have a video of a man killing another by shooting him in the street. He then puts more bullets into him while the victim is on the ground. The murderer then turns to the camera and gives the two finger salute. Why? Because he knew that the camera and recorder system was incapable of producing any recognizable evidence. He discovered that a 100 crimes back when his "brief" told him not to worry about the CCTV evidence as it was so bad it was not being offered in evidence against him.

Before any clever dicks rush to claim that they have see high quality CCTV video evidence, let me exclude PTZ cameras controlled by a mark one eyeball. If the operator is aware of the incident and can pan his camera and zoom in then we have a good chance of viable evidential quality video. But "Orrible Arry" knows how to beat this one. In a High Street scene "Orrible" arranged for mates to start a fight towards the West end of the street while he and his crew robbed a Post Office at the East end. You guessed it. The operator concentrated on the fight and totally missed the robbery.

Professor Martin Gill has recently completed a massive investigation into CCTV in the UK on behalf of the Home Office and his conclusions are virtually in agreement with the above.

I understand the problems installers face and that they have to make a living and they are controlled by the money their clients will pay. But we do need a group of installers to start to try to raise the level of quality and performance. I, and some of my peers, would be willing to lecture and provide actual visible detail information at a one day conference. Probably in the Birmingham area but to cover costs we would have to charge about £25 per head and we would need at least 500 to attend. Nobody thinks we would ever get that number or anywhere close so the idea never gets off the ground.

If any of you have any other topics you would like me to cover or questions then just ask.

Lee Tracey

[Zak]

Lee Tracey

Congratulations on the longest post I have ever read on here .

But very informative.

Obviously some clients would pay for the right amount of cameras and right capacity DVR to be useful in such scenarios - but I am pretty sure that if installers started pointing out how dire the situation is from your perspective then the UK will soon not be Europe's biggest spender of CCTV!

Regarding your proposed seminar, if it would improve quality of footage, leading to less wasted police time and enhance convictions, then why don't the police/government cover the cost? Also, if you really want to do it, if you marketed it correctly over a significant period of time with the major suppliers, inspectorates and other key people, then perhaps you would get the 500 people. And if they pay in advance and didn't turn up, you would have covered your costs.

It is a pretty bold and eye-opening statement to say that 80% of all CCTV installations are redundant from a Police point of view and not do anything about it.

[ian.cant]

Excellent post Lee, very eye opening in some respects.

I don

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Congratulations on the longest post I have ever read on here .

But very informative.

Obviously some clients would pay for the right amount of cameras and right capacity DVR to be useful in such scenarios - but I am pretty sure that if installers started pointing out how dire the situation is from your perspective then the UK will soon not be Europe's biggest spender of CCTV!

Regarding your proposed seminar, if it would improve quality of footage, leading to less wasted police time and enhance convictions, then why don't the police/government cover the cost? Also, if you really want to do it, if you marketed it correctly over a significant period of time with the major suppliers, inspectorates and other key people, then perhaps you would get the 500 people. And if they pay in advance and didn't turn up, you would have covered your costs.

It is a pretty bold and eye-opening statement to say that 80% of all CCTV installations are redundant from a Police point of view and not do anything about it.

Do something about it!!! The action was to employ Professor Martin Gill to carry out a survey and write a report. That has now been done but what next? I can send you a copy of the Martin Gill report but it is long and I would need an email address that could accept big postings. I have tried to send it to others but it has bounced back because they had a limited space email address. If there was a way that it could be provided on this site so that any interested party could download it then that must be a good thing.

I like your comment about it being an eye opening statement etc. It is not actually true that we are not trying to do something about it. I am a consulting engineer to the Forensic Imaging Division of West Midlands Police and in my small way I am trying to do something. The Force Forensic Video Analyst Dannie Parkes is also trying to do something. We both write articles and speak at conferences and this does mean having to name some DVR's. Mostly this gets me the hatred of the manufacturers who list me as a trouble-maker. You have to break eggs to make an omlette.

It is only in this last month or so that the message has seeped upwards. It is just not possible to get a giant organisation like the British Government activated in a different direction from the course they are on now but we are trying as two little minnows in a pond.

The key to all this is the insurance companies. If the insurance companies would accept a minimum standard and refuse insurance cover for any CCTV system below the quality standard then we would all win. You, as an installer, would win because you would be able to provide a decent installation of quality for a fair price and the idiot cheapjack down the road who can always do if for less but does not know if his backside is screwed, bored, riveted, countersunk or reamed would be out of the picture.

Let me ask a question!

I am due to retire at the end of this year and I have been considering offering a DVR on the market to installers. It is a 16 channel camera input that will record at 25 images per second on all channels at the same time and produce close to DVD quality on playback of recovered images. It will also record lip-sync audio with every channel. It is both a DVR and a server and will support up to eight hard drives internally and any size of NAS on the network - it has all the features you could ever desire and would cost installers about £2,880. But the really big aspect is that it makes high quality images of only 4K.

This means that if you start with 16 cameras X 4K per image x 25 images per second x 60 seconds in a minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 31 days you will arrive at the terabyte size of storage you need. If you change the 4K figure to that required by most DVR's, to produce DVD level quality, then you will have a figure more in the region of 27K to 57K. Now do the calculation with the new figure.

Then work out the cost difference in terabyte storage needed. Or for smaller systems the difference in gigabyte storage of hard drives.

So the question is: would installers buy it or would they go for the cheapest unit on the market?

Another aspect to consider when purchasing a DVR: You start with a high grade camera ( most are these days ) and this creates a digital image which is then changed to an analogue image output and fed to the analogue input of the DVR. The DVR then converts this back to digital and stores it on a hard drive. The DVR ( the bad ones ) then convert it back to analogue to display on a composite monitor. All these conversions reduce the original high quality camera image of about 400 TV lines down to about 240 TV lines on the recovered video from the DVR - a bit daft?

A DVR should be able to provide digital images to a DVD writer or CD writer where they stay digital and thereby cut out the final D/A conversion and the final loss.

Second question: I have been told that on this forum there was a long posting from many people about the performance of the LJD company. I cannot find it. Is it still stored somewhere or has it been removed?

Lee Tracey

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Excellent post Lee, very eye opening in some respects.

I don

[ian.cant]

Your spot on, changing isnt easy, cost driven purchases of CCTV in my opinion will rarely if ever, be changed in reality. I have long since given up on that as an ideal.

What would be a good start would be minimum specifications in situations such as Liquor Liscening. As far as i am aware "CCTV with 31 days recording" is all that is required to date.

(This is where you get 2fps recordings from. Maybe this situation will start to improve now with the introduction of MPEG4 recorders, as i understand they can record better quality in smaller recording space.)

The average corner shop takes the "31 days CCTV" situation and turns it to the minimum or whatever they can get away with. Ive even been asked if i can provide a system for rental just for a few days so they can pass the inspection. I declined of course but no doubt some will buy **** from Ebay to get round it.

Anyway, my point is a detailed specification to be used a a minimum acceptable standard that may be used as evidence in courts would be a good step forward. To a degree i suspect thats where you come in an decide whats **** and whats not. Surely we need to cut you out and be certain that what will be presented as evidence is very likley to be good as a very minimum (barring breakdowns). I wonder how much it costs currently to find that, as you say, 80% of recordings are a waste of time evidentially. Surely it would pay to have some kind of standard and to employ an inspector to ensure the standards are met.

[Zak]

Second question: I have been told that on this forum there was a long posting from many people about the performance of the LJD company. I cannot find it. Is it still stored somewhere or has it been removed?

Lee Tracey

Conduct a Search using "Cheap DVR" and some LJD posts will come up.

Lee, can you let us know what known brands of DVR's are acceptable/good in your opinion, and which are not?

Sometimes a giant company will bid at a loss just to get a specific contract. If I have written the spec then I spot this immediately and that company is out of the deal. I want an installer who has made a fair profit and has the desire and interest to be proud of his work and support it.

But I am often brushed aside by the financial departments who only look at the figures.

Lee Tracey

Unfortunately, I have never known it not to come down to money. Doesn't matter how much cheaper (to the point of ridiculousness), or even if the purchasers know it will cause grief, they will still award to the cheapest bidder.

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Conduct a Search using "Cheap DVR" and some LJD posts will come up.

Lee, can you let us know what known brands of DVR's are acceptable/good in your opinion, and which are not?

Can you find my comment about my offering a DVR when I retire at the end of this year and comment back to me

Unfortunately, I have never known it not to come down to money. Doesn't matter how much cheaper (to the point of ridiculousness), or even if the purchasers know it will cause grief, they will still award to the cheapest bidder.

I have written a comparison chart table and am gradually filling it in, about five different DVR's to a page. As soon as the first page is complete I will post it and then each page in turn - will you come to my funeral when the hitman gets me?

I am now going to try to attach the photographs I promised. They are zipped in rar and also in Coreldraw and JPG. Hope they can be unwound.

Failed to get the images through zipped. Half way through the screen changes to " Cannot find the page etc." strange. I will unzip and try to send individual images in the next posting.

Lee Tracey

[ian.cant]

So the question is: would installers buy it or would they go for the cheapest unit on the market?

I would say its not usually a decision as simple as that, its horses for courses to a degree.

Corner shop etc will be cheapest without doubt.

Town centre pubs etc maybe that would be a good place to use one but again they tend to push for cheapest.

Heres a classic example and i can post a link to the relevant story if i can find it.

Called to a sports complex where they complained they could find any recordings on the tapes from the previous night. (This was not my installation btw its an old system and they call me in when they have a problem). They had an old DM Sprite mux (cant recall the model number) connected to a Panasonic VCR (6124 i think it was). There was no video on the tapes but the recorder was recording when the Sprite was put in record mode, if it was left in play or live mode it didnt send video to the VCR. They told me they were having trouble getting the tapes out of the VCR also.

I checked the runtime on the VCR which was at 82000 hours or roughly 9 years of continous use, during which the VCR had never been serviced. Surprisingly the recordings were quite good but indeed the the tapes were sticking in the machine. I quoted for 1. The VCR to be serviced. 2. A new VCR (latest Panasonic equivalent). 3. A DM sprite DVR to replace the VCR and Mux so that they would always have recordings.

The reason why they need the recordings was, the previous night there had been a bit of a punch up during a presentation night. Someone had been smacked over the head with a large football trophy sustaining a fractured skull. This had all happened in the lobby/reception area which should have provided good images of the incident. Front page news of the local paper etc all high profile so guess what they went with.

They bought a new VCR because it was the cheapest option and also because the previous VCR had lasted nearly 10 years.

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Conduct a Search using "Cheap DVR" and some LJD posts will come up.

Lee, can you let us know what known brands of DVR's are acceptable/good in your opinion, and which are not?

Unfortunately, I have never known it not to come down to money. Doesn't matter how much cheaper (to the point of ridiculousness), or even if the purchasers know it will cause grief, they will still award to the cheapest bidder.

Will try again with some attachment photographs

Will try again with some attachment photographs

I sent about six photographs but can only find this one of five young men.

Lee Tracey

[Zak]

Were you referring to the DigiFlower from your first post? Is that the machine you want to market?

And what is wrong with that picture ? You can almost make out that one of them is on a bike.

I am now going to be a lot more diligent when quoting DVR's!!

[bri]

wow some post, very interesting and informative from all sides. I thought I could write.....but hey fella

[ian.cant]

Cheap DVR site searches come up in the trade section.

[Zak]

Well, he is obviously very passionate about his profession and has a lot of pent up frustration/aggravation. TSI = therapy

Cheap DVR site searches come up in the trade section.

No, not all of those posts are in the Trade section (I checked). Maybe wrong but sure that it is general members who can access a lot of it.

[Guest Lee Tracey]

Were you referring to the DigiFlower from your first post? Is that the machine you want to market?

And what is wrong with that picture ? You can almost make out that one of them is on a bike.

I am now going to be a lot more diligent when quoting DVR's!!

No! the DIGIFLOWER is one of the very many that I imported and tested and I liked it a lot. I then flogged it and it is doing sterling service in a security building alone with 6.4 terabytes of storage. However it used the MPEG-4 algorithm and that was not far enough into the math world for me. I like the H264 algorithm and the DVR I am considering flogging when I retire is based on this algorithm. I have taken the cheeky step of registering the company H264 Ltd ready for my onslaught into your cash reserves. When I get the hang of this forum thing a bit better I will put up some technical data to prove that the H264 algorithm is better than sliced bread.

Still cannot understand where my other images have gone but will try another now. If it works this is one from the Goliath camera. I think it was Ian who said the Goliath could not do better than a £1.50 camera. Do not understand that so must be getting thick as well as old.

Lee Tracey

[Rich]

I wonder how many CCTV salesman carry out an operational requirement referenced against home office guidelines for each camera?

I think one problem with CCTV now and as of the past couple of years is the internet. There are a lot of CCTV packaged systems being advertised and I think this is not doing our industry any favours, I am refering to the small user, like corner shops. We all know the most expensive piece of equipment is the DVR, but even with the cheapest lowest quality recoding DVR's surely it is still possible to use a correct combination of cameras to achieve a quality of recording that can be used as evidence, for example, a silmilar set up to the bookies you mentioned.