ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

after having my car vandalized a number of times during the night, and having been assaulted outside my home just before christmas, I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade from the 2 webcams that I currently use with zoneminder.

I would love to go all out and by an axis 223 IP camera, but i'm sure you'll agree they are a little pricey.

I need something fairly high res, with night vision capabilities that would be suitable for face recognition at a later stage.

the question is: are the slightly lower priced axis day / night cameras good enough for this, or would I be better off buying a capture card and some analogue day/night cams that you will hopefully be able to reccomend.

Thanks

Mat

ip cams will give you greater res but as noted are dearer. I would advise you save for the 2 meg new day night from axis. re facial recognition under uk guidlines you need 325 lines top to bottom of a 1.6m person to achive identification (court use) so if you use conventional cams then you will need to view only a certain area. with a 2megepixel there are 1600 verical pixels so the same quality can be achived but nearly 6 times wider.

In practical use, faces can be recognised only within a relatively close range (<10Meters) with the 205/6 Axis ranges at 640x480 in average light. (Which aren't night vision). Going greyscale seems to increase that clarity slightly.

Good light you can up this a bit, bad light reduce it. Also in bad light people moving quickly tend to blur as the "shutter speed" slows down to compensate for poor light.

The bottom end of the IP range really isn't that good wrt lenses and sensors, ime. One of our cameras (Gadspot 1600 with 12mm lens) caught an attempted assault (car being driven at a neighbour) but the range (200m) was too far for it to be useful. (Despite the neighbour supplying the police with the car number plate, they did not pursue the complaint.)

sadly, that is also my experience with our oh so wonderful police service

I may therefore in future have to settle things on the same level as these petty criminals

so, time to start saving up for those nice matt black megapixel cams then

thanks for the advice

Mat