Re: Longest distance between camera and PC?

["accidental plumber" <aplayerinla@xxxxxxxxx>]

Are you planning running a cam all the way down the beach day and
night?  You pervert.

The critical part is the CCD, and size matters.  So 1/3 in or 1/4 in is
about as good as a mid range camcorder.  $300 to $500.  Divide that by
3 to get a B&W.  ~$200 is about right for a high quality B&W camera.

Someone must be selling something wrong if it cost more than $300.  For
that you can mount a color camcorder.  Is that good enough for you?

You will run into hopeless situations if you behave like kids, I want
this I want that while you don't have a clue.

You better start with your object or specifications.  Running something
digital for a few hundred yards doesn't make much sense.  For audio you
can run PCM and even lay fiber.  For digital the closest thing is DVI,
which is miles apart, and has a range about 2 ft.

Again to protect something, cameras are the last thing in the priority
of things.  Can you afford staff to monitor the cams 24/7?  You hope to
give the video to LE and hope that they catch the thief AFTER you
building is broken into?  Only in public places like shops that they
have no choice but use camera to deter robbery.  In private homes you
have lot of choices to guard against break in.

You stress quality, but it depends on what you want to achieve.
Camcorder grade, DVD resolution at 720 (640) x 480 is the most you need
for security.  That's sufficient for high quality internet porn too.

The distance that you are monitoring affects the quality.  Normally
cameras are best to protect inside corridors, entrances etc.  The
maximum distance will be limited so faces will appear fairly large on
cam.  You don't need high quality to see the faces clearly.
Unfortunately if you rely on cam only you need quite a few of them.  If
you use one cam to cover the whole parking lot, you need to mount it
high or far from the cars.  You can't even see the license plates after
enhancement.  If you point the cam to the beach, you can't even see
what they are doing.

B&W and quality is oxymoron.  Imagine a American most wanted broadcast,
"A dark guy drove away in a light car".

Night vision and security is oxymoron.  You want plenty of light around
to deter.  With night vision you can mount it secretly to record in the
dark.  That doesn't protect anything unless you have some security
guards to sit and watch the cameras 24/7.  As most security cameras are
big and intimidating, you don't need night vision.

Night vision is best for you to see from miles if that's a head or not,
and shoot.  Image information is worse than B&W.  The contrast is much
lower.  Many comes with characteristic little IR LED around the camera.
 If you add up all the powers of the LED, it's smaller than a 50W bulb.
 And a bulb if more efficient light source for ordinary camera at
night.  So I always suggest a normal camera with as much light you can
afford the electricity, or add overly sensitive PIR floodlight.

Night vision is basically ordinary camera with the IR filters lifted.
So you are not getting any better quality.  You get shifted colors in
daytime and blurred shadows at night.

There's nothing wrong with NTSC signal, before HDTV, some morons drive
50 inch big screen TV's the size of a whole wall using NTSC.  If you
want digital, the Ethernet is available.  It cheaper if you mount a PC
with the cam, provided that you don't mind the size.

Getting the video is the easy bit, storing it is the problem.  Of
course if you have a team of security guards on watch 24/7 is
different.  Motion detection is often linked to cams.  Firstly, try
playing DVD 24/7 on your PC.  So if you get your "digital" whatever, it
will be high power and hot.  So using a PIR to turn on the cam prolongs
the life of everything.  Battery operation is possible too.

The other reason for motion detection is storage.  20 GB will last a
few days of continuous video.  With motion detection, that could be
weeks or a month.  With motion detection you can capture only the
interesting part in a SD card.  The whole DVR can be discreetly hidden
and protected.

With wireless or wired ethernet cam, local storage is required for the
mp2/4 files.  So it make sense to send image off when movement is
detected, and discard the rest.

Often motion detection is done at the cam, using firmware.  It's not a
big deal as mostly likely it's counting pixels sequentially.


(PeteCresswell) wrote:
> Per Geolt3:
> >You might want to look at this wireless outdoor camera,
> >http://www.gadget-spot.com/proddetail.php?prod=NC1600W It looks like a
> >commercial grade outdoor camera but with wireless. It's a little more
> >pricy but not way out there. They don't give too much info on the
> >wireless but it uses a 400mW card. Worth a look anyway. Good Luck, this
> >is only the 3rd 802.11b/g outdoor camera that will I have been able to
> >find.
>
> I'm coming around to realization that my $400 figure was hopelessly low.
>
> Now I'm thinking $1200-1500.
>
> Question:
> From that camera's specs, it sounds like motion detection is built into the
> camera.   This is at odds with my expectation that the camera would just keep
> pumping pix back to the PC and software in the PC would make the decision as to
> whether or not there was motion and save/discard the images according.
>
> How come this isn't the case?
>
> Or can it be done either way, with camera-based detection used for non-PC
> systems?
> --
> PeteCresswell