Shuttle SB52G2 & D-Link DCS-1000W mini-reviews

["Philip Coombes" <philip.coombes@xxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've picked up the above bits of kit in the last couple of days in my
effort
to build a good ZoneMinder reference system and thought I'd pass on my
opinions so far and canvass any anyone else has.

Firstly the Shuttle box, the SB52G2 is the new small form factor box and
>from
>from
The guide that comes with it takes you through it spells everything out
step
by step and you get all the cables, ties and other stuff you might need in
it. Result, in a couple of hours a neat fully functional PC with two PCI
slots that's about the same size as a couple of shoeboxes, ideal for HA.
Well, I say a couple of hours, it actually took me double that because I
spent a while trying to discover why the IDE autodetection wasn't working,
it turned out I'd shorted out the IDE leads in the chassis cable grips,
whoops! I thoroughly endorse this product!

The other thing I got at the same time is the D-Link DCS-1000W wireless
network camera. This looks a nice bit of kit on paper but so far I can't
say
I've been impressed. The initial configuration is a pain in the arse, you
have to change your PC or networks's IP address to be on the same subnet as
it and make sure you have no conflicts. Once that's done you can then make
it go DHCP but you have to do this each time you might need to factory
reset. The configuration screens are very basic and the manuals don't
exactly help, including a reference to an autoconfigure program that
doesn't
exist anywhere as far as I can see. Then when you get it working, it will
just about manage about 1FPS which I though was fair enough over wireless,
but it's the same over wired LAN as well. Plus the picture quality is
awful,
with very little colour saturation (I though it was set B&W initially),
and
you either get very dull dark images or completely washed out overexposed
ones with strange purple or green colour hues. The built in image
adjustment
sliders seem to make little difference. I've contacted their support as
it's
possible I have a defective unit but they are very defensive and not all
that helpful. The other thing that is a pain in the arse is that you can
set
five levels of JPEG compression but it doesn't tell you what these levels
correspond to in JPEG quality terms and even on the lowest level of
compression, i.e.. the biggest images, the image is covered with dancing
JPEG blocks and artefacts and you can't get to an uncompressed image. All
in
all, I'm not really impressed. I cannot endorse this product!!!

Hope this is helpful.

Cheers,

Phil,