I'm also looking for a decent camera at a reasonable price.
I've read and heard very good things about the Mobotix cameras but don't want a spend that much at this time.
Here's a quickie review of some decent cameras / prices.
http://www.cocoontech.com/forums/index. ... opic=17255
Suggestions please: IP PoE for outdoor, 15M range
So I have all the gear and have started playing around with it.
The mobotix I ordered was a Q24M-Sec-D11 (11m hemispherical, day sensor/IR cut filter, Secure model of the Q24M).
There is a tremendous amount of configurability, and I find the web interface (hosted out the camera itself) to be the best. I find MxControlCenter and MxEasy to be buggy, although I am trying to use them on a real piece of dog shit laptop, so who knows.
MxPEG is bloody marvelous... the Q24M-Sec ships with 4GB internal flash storage, and I have yet to fill it up with 1 fps continuous recording + max FPS event driven recording for two days @ a combination of megapixel and 3mpixel resolution. This is currently in the living room so its capturing me walking around all day as events too.
I will say that if you want to use this camera outdoors or in conditions w/ weak lighting, get the night model. My living room reached a peak of 10 lux today according to the built in meter and was able to run the shutter at about 1/8sec.
As you can see, right now it is about 5.8 lux and running at 1/3sec shutter speed.
(Although as you can see I could dial down the exposure a little bit, it is fairly bright...)
Note: Those curved boxes are Motion Detection ("VM") windows, they are curved because you define them on the original fisheye image, so when that image gets distortion-corrected, so do the boxes.
Configurability of the VM windows seems just a hair behind zoneminder in terms of flexibility. Certainly is pretty complete though.
The interior lighting is quite dim, they are all the lowest wattage (like 9w...) fluorescent bulbs I could find.
I dragged the camera outside during the day (cloudy) and at 500 lux it is a very very pretty picture @ high frame rates too.
So, if you have lighting and/or only care about daylight, go with the day lense/sensor.
I'll let you know how the night ones turn out after I receive them.
The notification configuration options are fantastic, there are just tons and tons of possibilities with "Actions". I was at one point thinking I would have to use Zoneminder to trigger X11 devices and such, but you wouldn't even need to do that so long as you had some little server acting as a "X11 gateway" running maybe something like a simple web server with some basic cgi listening for instructions, which the mobotix can do.
e.g.,
The NAS I picked up (Synology RS810+) runs Linux and interestingly I believe a few people have tried running Zoneminder natively on the NAS... might be worth doing since I will have the mobotix throw data at the NAS already. I think it should have the grunt (it has a quad core processor even though literature advertises dual core... i guess that's just standard these days *lol*)[/img]
The mobotix I ordered was a Q24M-Sec-D11 (11m hemispherical, day sensor/IR cut filter, Secure model of the Q24M).
There is a tremendous amount of configurability, and I find the web interface (hosted out the camera itself) to be the best. I find MxControlCenter and MxEasy to be buggy, although I am trying to use them on a real piece of dog shit laptop, so who knows.
MxPEG is bloody marvelous... the Q24M-Sec ships with 4GB internal flash storage, and I have yet to fill it up with 1 fps continuous recording + max FPS event driven recording for two days @ a combination of megapixel and 3mpixel resolution. This is currently in the living room so its capturing me walking around all day as events too.
I will say that if you want to use this camera outdoors or in conditions w/ weak lighting, get the night model. My living room reached a peak of 10 lux today according to the built in meter and was able to run the shutter at about 1/8sec.
As you can see, right now it is about 5.8 lux and running at 1/3sec shutter speed.
(Although as you can see I could dial down the exposure a little bit, it is fairly bright...)
Note: Those curved boxes are Motion Detection ("VM") windows, they are curved because you define them on the original fisheye image, so when that image gets distortion-corrected, so do the boxes.
Configurability of the VM windows seems just a hair behind zoneminder in terms of flexibility. Certainly is pretty complete though.
The interior lighting is quite dim, they are all the lowest wattage (like 9w...) fluorescent bulbs I could find.
I dragged the camera outside during the day (cloudy) and at 500 lux it is a very very pretty picture @ high frame rates too.
So, if you have lighting and/or only care about daylight, go with the day lense/sensor.
I'll let you know how the night ones turn out after I receive them.
The notification configuration options are fantastic, there are just tons and tons of possibilities with "Actions". I was at one point thinking I would have to use Zoneminder to trigger X11 devices and such, but you wouldn't even need to do that so long as you had some little server acting as a "X11 gateway" running maybe something like a simple web server with some basic cgi listening for instructions, which the mobotix can do.
e.g.,
The NAS I picked up (Synology RS810+) runs Linux and interestingly I believe a few people have tried running Zoneminder natively on the NAS... might be worth doing since I will have the mobotix throw data at the NAS already. I think it should have the grunt (it has a quad core processor even though literature advertises dual core... i guess that's just standard these days *lol*)[/img]
