When I want to buy a lens or a digital camera, I go to dpreview.com, read the independent reviews, reports, and discussions, and then buy, knowing exactly what I am getting into. But for a network surveillance camera, how do I get the same information? Why are there no network camera review sites?
There are plenty of places that will list and compare specs, but specs don't tell the whole story. What's the build quality like? How about low-light use with moving objects? Are the motors noisy? Are the screw covers captive? Is the software compatible? Secure? Fast? How much more image quality does the extra $300 actually get me?
At SightMind, we see many cameras from many vendors, but we install only about twenty different models across a wide range of customers and situations. Knowing the impact of camera quality on our costs and customer satisfaction, we carefully evaluate each promising camera, compare it against our customer's needs, and only approve a new model if we absolutely have to.
Because camera evaluation is a skilled and time-consuming task and valuable to our business, we keep the results firmly under our hat. Repeat this exercise across all the installers in the US, and you have a very costly and inefficient system. If only there were a Consumer Reports for network surveillance cameras that we could all browse through once a month.
Who could create unbiased, meaningful, and consistent set of camera evaluations? It can't be the manufacturers, obviously, and it's not the installers because most of them don't care, don't have the staff, or wouldn't publish. The software companies have all the cameras but it would do them nothing but harm to branch off into the hardware business.
Maybe an independent company could come to our rescue, evaluating for a fee. But would anyone use their service or trust their results? Or how about a magazine or web-site funded by advertising that gave away its evaluations? Traffic would be too light. And anyway, who would be funding the advertising?
When you get right down to it, camera evaluation is 90% image evaluation. While the conditions can be carefully controlled and reproduced consistently, you're always making the final measurements with eyeballs, and so far at least, there's no HTML tag that fully expresses what they see. And when it's the customer's eyeballs that pay the bills, nobody is going to offload such an important function to a third party.
