On 11/3/2008 10:17, Duncan Patton a Campbell wrote: >> look at the Axis cameras. >> > > Yes, this > > http://www.axis.com/products/cam_207w/index.htm > > is the sort of thing I was talking about. >
I used Axis web cameras about 3 years ago to monitor a parking lot and had lots of quality issues. They could have improved since then, but I would recommend evaluating any camera thoroughly before buying it. I used the camera to upload frames to the OpenBSD FTP server every 10 seconds or so, and then used ffmpeg to convert them into avi movie, and presented the archived movies via httpd. Camera would stop the upload for no reason every other day, and I couldn't get it to work. Company's support was not very helpfull either. In the end, I wrote a expect script that would reset the camera every day, which seem to help somewhat, but the issue still remained. Also, make sure that the picture quality is adequate for what you are trying to accomplish: - how does it perform in different lighting conditions (day/night/rain/fog/etc.): e.g. can you read the license plate of the vehicle if you monitoring the parking lot, or can you reliably identify a person based on the camera image. That sort of things are often overlooked :) - how many cameras do you need to cover a particular area: while the field of view may be sufficient to cover the monitored area, resolution/focus is sufficient only in a part of the whole field of view. - consider a camera which could be integrated with a motion sensor, door switch, etc, so it only records when event is triggered. Its not fun skimming through hours of video trying to catch 3 frames when a particular event happened. - cabling (Ethernet/power) and environments housing are also interesting subjects that should be considered up front, before you settle on the desired zoom/resolution/sensitivity Good luck, Alex
