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A Buyers' Guide to IP Surveillance Cameras

IP network-based surveillance cameras offer enticing possibilities. But do you want full or partial IP? How much bandwidth? We'll walk you through the entire process.

DON'T think small when upgrading from analog/VCR systems. When the VCRs at the Montgomery County school district began breaking down, Hellmuth first switched to digital video recorders (DVRs). After talking with a consultant, however, he came up with a bigger strategy: centralizing all its security systems, including alarms, access control, visitor management and surveillance, on one platform. As it turned out, the current network infrastructure could support such a system.

Despite the lower cost of the DVR approach, there just weren't a lot of benefits, Hellmuth says. Each could support only 16 cameras, and there was only about two weeks of storage capacity. The school district is now in the middle of a six-year project that will cost $1.5 million per year. "When we decided we wanted to tie all the security components together, we were able to paint a better picture for the funding sources on why we needed more cameras and better quality cameras."
DO understand the trade-offs to high-quality images. Gompers advises people to favor a crisper image over smooth motion.

"Digital quality is not as crisp," McInturf says, but it meets the school's needs, and for now he's choosing not to upgrade to megapixel cameras because of the resulting bandwidth and storage requirements. "It's a balancing act between the storage required and the detail you capture," he says. "If you're capturing the highest quality of video using megapixel cameras and you've set it up perfectly, at that point, you're recording a lot more data than from an analog standpoint."
DO consider the benefits of centralizing video surveillance. Before N.C. State standardized on a single IP surveillance system, each department had invested in its own equipmentâ¬some analog, some IP. As a result, it was difficult to locate anyone who knew how to operate the system. "If it was an older system, the tape had run out long ago and no one was looking after it, or they didn't know how to operate the software," he says. Now, campus police can just log in themselves, rather than working with each department to view security footage.
DON'T assume everything is mix and match. While many network cameras claim compatibility with many vendors' video management software, "some management software is more open than others," Harris says. For instance, Bastian points out, the Verint software he uses performs health monitoring of its own cameras, even alerting users to the temperature of cameras. However, with non-Verint hardware, the system can tell you when a camera is out, but not whether it was due to heat.
McInturf has also run into compatibility issues. While he appreciates the fact that he can use multiple cameras with his DVTel management software, each camera poses a learning curve in terms of how it relates to the software. For instance, the motion detection settings in DVTel's software tended to conflict with those settings in the Axis cameras. As a result, the cameras were recording 24/7 and filled up the storage archive in a week. The DVTel software also doesn't currently support megapixel cameras, he says. "The message is that the IP industry for video is still young and fairly proprietary, and everything doesn't work with everything else," he says.##