DVR Digital Systems

THE SPY SHOP
DIRECT

"Keeping An Electronic
Eye On The World"

Our Business Hours

9:00am - 5:30pm
Monday - Friday

9:00am - Noon
Saturday
Central Time Zone

Closed Sunday

Phone

507-289-2560

Ext. 601 - Sales
Ext. 608 - Fax Mach

Mailing Address

838 S Broadway
Rochester MN
55904

Located In The
Soldier Field Plaza
9th St SE
At S. Broadway

DVR Digital Video
Surveillance Systems

Digital Video Recording (DVR) has become the
video surveillance standard in the security
industry, and for good reason. VCR-based
recording has many drawbacks. Tapes jamming,
poor video quality due to slow recording speed
and tapes simply wearing out all create problems.
If your recording media is unreliable, your entire
video surveillance is also.

Until recently, we've been handling DVR cards - a
four camera input card that slips into a PCI slot in
your PC. The images are recorded to your PC's
hard drive. Video capture, split screen
monitoring (as well as individual camera blow-up),
recording all four inputs at the same time and
web remote viewing provided many advantages
over the traditional VCR. Other features include
recording on a schedule, recording on motion
sensing and alerts to email and pagers. The total
length of recording is limited only by the available
space on your hard drive. Not all is roses,
however, with the DVR card. There are inherent
problems that continually rear their ugly heads.

First and foremost, the PC must remain on and
the surveillance software must be running at all
times. Otherwise, you will have no security
system. Employees and kids at home have a
habit of closing the software and/or turning off
the computer. Secondly, if you're running
memory-intensive programs along with the
surveillance system, your computer slows to a
crawl. Then there's the PC itself.

Customers often ask about securing their cabins
and lake homes, and inevitably, they decide not
to put a dedicated PC on location, as many use
laptops and take them back to their main home.

Decent quality DVR cards are spendy. You can
go on Ebay and buy them cheap, but as the
saying goes, you get what you pay for. The card
itself may be okay, but the software is almost
always pirated. At the present time, Ebay is
flooded with Pico brand cards. The card is good,
but you're going to get an illegal copy of the
software. Good luck getting your money back. A
good DVR card with licenseable software will
generally start out around $600.00. Then toss in
the cost of the computer necessary to handle the
video capture and you're up to about $2000.00

We've gone to a stand-alone DVR system that
eliminates all the trouble mentioned above, and
the four camera system is very attractively
priced at $329.95. There is an internal 250 Gig
hard drive, video sequencer, NIC for remote web
viewing and administration, and all the features of
the DVR card software. Tag on a monitor or color
TV, and you have an full-blown digital video
surveillance system. And any A/V style camera
will work on the input.

The system is password protected both locally
and on the web, and you don't need proprietary
software to access it on line. You use your
current IE. It has external alarm contacts and
overwrite capability, so that when the drive gets
full, you can set it to start recording over the
oldest images first.

The DVR units come in 4, 8 or 12 camera
configurations, with 8 and 12 having a 500 Gig
hard drive. Physically it's just a little smaller than
a typical DVD/VCR, so it doesn't take up a lot of
room and may be located just about anywhere.
You can also set it up with either a dynamic IP
address or a static IP address, and assign a port.
This allows you to set your router to utilize
port-forwarding and DMZ hosting. If I've lost you
on the router, no worries. We'll set it up for you.

Give us a call today at 289-2560 Ext. 601 for more
information, or stop by our store. We have
several DVR systems installed at commercial
locations, and our clients agree that this is a vast
improvement over DVR cards.