Many of you enjoyed the Samsung fragile camera post (well, not the Samsung marketing department but...)
One of you raised the question of IPVM doing vandal resistance tests. I think that would be interesting to do. The question becomes what's the best way to do it. There are a lot of models and a lot of ways to strike a camera.
There's the 'scientific' way of free-falling a weight on a camera but the downside is that it's hard to know how to map that to real world attacks (bat, stick, hammer, hand, etc.).
Formal test:
Field test:
Some questions:
- What cameras to test? There's hundreds of models claimed to be vandal resistant with most not mentioning any details or IK levels. Even if they do, can we trust it?
- What tools / attacks should we use? Do we keep on hitting it in the same way until it breaks? If it does not break, can we try another attack method or does the first one impact the structural integrity, making the second test skewed?
- How do we do this without spending tens of thousands of dollars? Since we will be breaking cameras probably very quickly, this could really get expensive and not prove that much.
- Is there certain construction techniques or material choices that would likely drive / dictate performance?