207 aprox £150
207mw aprox £250
210 aprox £250
I have all 3 cameras working at 640 x 480.
The 207 and the 207mw look very similar with a small cheap lense the main difference being that the mw is a mega pixel camera capable of 1280 x 1024 although i have it set at 640 x 480. The quality of the picture is similar for the 207 and the 207mw but the 207mw has a much wider filed of vision, it seems to have a wider angle lens.
The following were screenshots taken at 11 am in a shop with full glass front and fluorescent lighting switched on.
The 207:
The 207mw:
As you can see the 207mw gets the full width of the shop in, the shop is approx 5 metres wide just over 5 yards for you folks in the US.
When positioned the 207mw and the 207 were positioned 4 metres from the back wall facing it, the 207mw managed to fit the whole width of the shop in frame where as the 207 only managed about half.
The following was a screen shot taken from the 210, this produces roughly the same field of view as the straight 207, is slightly crisper and has a more natural feel to the colours, the lense is better than on the other cameras.
The 210:
The 210 does perform better in low light conditions but non of them perform in darkness.
I have the stream quality for the images in zoneminder set to 80.
And all the cameras are set in zoneminder as follows:
/axis-cgi/jpg/image.cgi?resolution=640x480
they are set on record with fps set to 4.
The cameras themselves are set as follows:
frame rate limited to 4fps and image compression at 20
With these compression levels i can see little or no difference in image quality.
The images are rotated by the camera by 180 degrees.
The 'server' that i am using is dedicated to Zoneminder and the spec is as follows:
2gb ram ddr2
amd athlon 64 x2 dual core 4400+ processor
system disk 40gb ide
data disk 750gb sata
onboard ethernet + additional 10/100 network card
The os is debian etch with the following kernel 2.6.18-5-686.
Zoneminder is version: v1.23.1
The cameras sit on their own network connected to an 8port netgear 10/100 switch which is then connected to 1 of the network cards.
The main office network then connects to the other card keeping all camera traffic to its own private network.
For the streaming server i am using /cgi-bin/nph-zms, i tried zms which seems to produce a lower load but was causing apache to lock up.
Apache is as follows: apache2 2.2.3-4+etch4
Streaming reponse on the cameras is near instant through the zoneminder console. I did have a problem with the live streaming being behind up to about a minute one of the main problems that was causing this was the virus checker on the client machine scanning the internet traffic, so i would advise trying your virus checker / firewalls as disabled if you are experiencing such delays even if you have a high spec client. The client machine i was using was an intel core 2 due with 2gb running xp and firefox2.
The 750gb disk allows for 7 days 24/7 recording at 4fps with the above settings.
It has been running without problems for several weeks now. The uptime is currently 21 days.
The output from free -m is as follows:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1963 1914 49 0 61 1605
-/+ buffers/cache: 247 1716
Swap: 729 0 729
I am not sure if this is expected/normal or a problem as you can see no swap is used as out of 2gb only 49mb is free but 1605mb is cached.
Looking at the output from top i have
the following processes running currently:
zmaudit.pl -c
zmdc.pl startup
zmfilter.pl
zmwatch.pl
9 x nph-zms
3 x zma
3 x zmc
19 x apache2
42 x mysqld
Both cores of the cpu are running at about 50%
And the load at the mo is around 2
Each zms-nph is taking between 9-18% cpu
zma & zmc about 9% cpu each
Here's some out put from sysstat:
10:55:02 CPU %user %nice %system%iowait %steal %idle
11:05:01 all 32.25 0.00 1.63 0.58 0.00 65.54
11:15:01 all 39.55 0.00 1.85 0.47 0.00 58.13
11:25:01 all 44.14 0.00 2.04 0.75 0.00 53.07
11:35:01 all 45.72 0.00 2.08 0.55 0.00 51.65
11:45:01 all 45.21 0.00 2.01 0.41 0.00 52.38
11:55:01 all 46.31 0.00 2.07 0.52 0.00 51.10
12:05:01 all 49.11 0.00 2.22 0.34 0.00 48.34
Average: all 24.02 0.32 1.11 0.85 0.00 73.70
A more worrying output from 6:35 this morning is below with an %iowait of 24.11
06:35:02 all 21.73 15.41 6.95 24.11 0.00 31.79
I am not convinced that all is well on the system and any advice on the performance above would be appreciated.
I did have a background filter running to delete all events over 7 days old, but this was really sending the load through the roof with 'rm' seeming to cause the issue. I have switched off the background filter for now, which unfortunately means i now have to run it manually.
If you have any questions on the cameras, please don't hesitate to ask. I would prob say that the 207mw offers the best value with extra coverage that it offers although the 210 is definitely higher quality than either of the other 2.
I still consider the system under testing, I will update this as time allows with any other findings/cures. Any advice appreciated.
Regards
Lee