The Axis M7001 Surveillance Kit is a two part device in that the actual M7001 part is a video encoder that run via PoE (power over ethernet) and can drive two streams, one been the supplied camera and the other is ANY CCTV type camera (BNC Connection). Due to the small size and the fact you do not need any power for the external camera, you can place the CCTV anywhere you need. It scales up to 704×576 for high quality video.
Recently I was in need of some CCTV for the home, I had a few choices on this, such as buying a complete kit for £300 which comes with 4 camera’s and a base unit to record everything. As I already have a Synology NAS Box which comes with Synology Surveillance Station, a feature to connect an IP camera and record 24/7, I thought why not buy myself a IP Camera? Looking through the list of supported camera’s, on that was listed was FOSCAM. The next stage was to figure out how much to spend and which one to buy.
The HTC Hero (my current contract phone) comes with a 5 megapixel camera – what a large number that sounds, much better then say the 3 megapixel that the iPhone 3 comes with right? The problem comes when you want to take some pictures with it, if you have a lot of light, then this works great but the second it gets even a little dark, you might as well forget using it.
If you wanted to create a stream live to the world – what so you need to get the best picture, best Audio and the most viewers? Let us first talk about the Camera, a Webcam can do the job but they come in two different types and the quality between them is like night and day. They are either fitted with a CMOS lens (Rubbish) or a CCD (much better) and also the resolution can go from 320×240 all the way up to 2MP. Rememebr that the stream is a certain size, it matters not that your camera can push out a mega high resolution when in fact the stream can only cope with 320×240 for example. What about using a DV Camera via firewire instead of a web cam? Will this provide a much better picture? Well as it also uses a CCD Lens, it is going to be no better then a good webcam picture wise but a point to remember is that you can spend as much on a web cam as you can on a very cheap DV CamCorder, you can use the Camcorder for other tasks (general recording) but it won’t rest on top of your monitor.
Now onto Audio – a PC Mic or one’s that are built into Laptop etc are plain bad – they are not only going to pick up noise around the machine (fan noise) but also be bad quality in respect of your voice. The one built into my imac by all accounts though is quite good, as I move away, it raises the volume and I sound pretty much the same. The best but also the most expensive is the USB Mic’s you see Musician use – these can set you back a lot of money and unless you can afford this, can make money later or whatever – then find another way to get the audio across.
