| The Source for Video Surveillance | Download the FREE Video Surveillance Book |
Testing Avigilon's H.264 HD Camera
by Antony Look, posted on Jul 13, 2011Avigilon is one of the better known and respected recent entrants in the video surveillance market. While they have received significant praise for their quality and usability, historically they had two important constraints:
- The company's cameras were only supported by Avigilon's own VMS. If you wanted to use their cameras, you had to migrate to their VMS.
- Their cameras supported only JPEG2000. While JPEG2000 offers some important benefits, the bandwidth consumption is much higher than H.264, the de facto standard in today's IP camera market.
In the last year, Avigilon released a line of H.264 camera with support for ONVIF, addressing both issues. Now that you can use Avigilon cameras with 3rd party VMS systems, it does raise the question of how well Avigilon's quality matches up against other IP cameras used more commonly in 'open' VMS deployments.
To that end, we bought an Avigilon 1.0MP-HD-H264-B1 box camera and conducted a series of shootouts between Avigilon, Axis and Sony cameras in a variety of real world surveillance scenarios. In this report, we share our test findings.
Here are a few of the test scenes used including indoor, outdoor, day, night and WDR:
We analyzed each of the scenes to see how the Avigilon camera performed relative to the other cameras. We exported the simultaneous recordings and then digitally zoomed each camera to the same level to show differences. The sample comparison below from this test shows an example of the analysis (camera names/models revealed inside the Pro section):
We conducted our analysis across 10 scenes. They are:
- Indoor Even Artificial Lighting (Moderately Wide FoV)
- Indoor Even Artificial Lighting (Narrow FoV)
- Indoor Low-Light (Default)
- Indoor Low-Light (Normalized)
- Outdoor Daytime Even Lighting (Wide FoV)
- Outdoor Daytime Even Lighting (Moderately Wide FoV)
- Outdoor Nighttime (Wide FoV)
- Outdoor Nighttime (Moderately Wide FoV)
- WDR Scene (Bright)
- WDR Scene (Dark)
Additionally, we examined bandwidth differences across the cameras and scenes to see any tradeoffs in bandwidth vs quality.
Most Recent Industry Reports
IP Camera PC Training on May 23, 2012
Over and over, we are told that this is the most common and fundamental problem techs have getting started with IP cameras. They come to a job site, or even to training, and they need to connect th...
IP Camera Standards Use Revealed on May 21, 2012
Just four years ago, IP camera standards were no more than a dream. All IP cameras were integrated with proprietary interfaces or using the simplest most basic connections. This added to the cost o...
IPVM New Features May 2012 on May 20, 2012
We have added in 4 new features to IPVM and have another half-dozen lined up for the second half of the year. In this post, we explain the new features.Invoice Auto GenerationEvery week, many membe...
Axis vs Hikvision IP Camera Test Results on May 16, 2012
Hikvision is the most valuable video surveillance company in the world, going public in 2010 at $6 Billion USD and now trading at over $7 Billion USD, far higher than Axis Communications. Even in t...
Should Manufacturers Write A&E Specs? on May 09, 2012
Users depend on architects and engineers (A&Es) to design buildings that best meet their needs. However, many A&Es use specifications from door hardware manufacturers that give away specifi...
Video Surveillance Buyer's Guide 2012 on May 06, 2012
With so many manufacturers and so many new products, deciding what products to buy can be overwhelming. Last year, to make this easier, we released our first ever Video Surveillance Buyer's Guide&n...
The Right Aspect Ratio for Surveillance on May 04, 2012
You are wrong about the best aspect ratio for surveillance, at least statistically speaking. In the past few years, as HD swept into living rooms, people have moved from watching video on 4:3 aspec...
Panasonic WV-SP509 Camera Test on May 03, 2012
The world's best all around HD camera - that's what the new Panasonic WV-SP509 was declared at the Milestone shootout. But is it really? That's the goal of this test. We took the Panasonic WV-SV509...
IP Camera Networking Basics on Apr 30, 2012
Getting started with IP cameras can be daunting for those without experience in computer networks. Fortunately, it is not that hard. In this report, we train networking novices on how get started u...
Top Trend - Edge Storage Test on Apr 25, 2012
The top technology trend for Spring 2012 is edge storage, as selected by your fellow IPVM readers. While edge storage has slowly evolved it had never made a big push to the 'core' of the video surv...