I rarely get called about security cameras but a long time customer has been having problems with a union and asked me to look into installing some cameras and a DVR. I would like the highest resolution possible to hopefully identify vandals, their cars, etc.

Crappy security camera resolution has always been a beef of mine, especially when the rest of the imaging industry (TV and digital cameras) has been in a megapixil race for years. One thing I cannot find is a High Def security camera. Would seem to me that with the number of IP network cameras out there that standard definition and NTSC would have been abandoned. Does such a beast exist?

-Hal

Take a look at Bosch.

Hal,
Try CoVi technologies, Inc. in Austin,Texas. Looks like good quality product. Some huge casinos start to install those by the tables.

Jeff, I did look at Bosch but I may have missed something, I'll check right now. Vad, I did see what they call "casino" cameras but they were still only like 480 lines NTSC.

-Hal

I never tried them but check this out

I know Bosch has some very nice IP cameras that are high megapixel but I guess you want traditional coax...

No, believe it or not IP. I found what you were talking about at Bosch.

Merritt, that stuff is pretty impressive. But now it dawns on me- what the hell do you use to store all that high bandwidth video? Gotta look at their DVRs, betcha that's where the $$$$ is going to go.

-Hal

Hal Arecont is one of the companies that we've used for the 8 Mpix cams. I can't remember the other one, but I can get the name for you. The issue as you found becomes setting up a gigabit LAN and subnetting everything properly. The cams are expensive and storage needs to be carefully designed. We ran it all to a RAID array.