Have you ever participated in a bid where competing camera manufacturers were scored by the client on the best picture in a side by side comparison? As John has noted/inferred in previous articles, quality is a hard thing to specify. Lets say its a blind comparison. Monitors are situated in front of the customer (which by the way includes his IT guy who is interested in things like storage, bit rates, etc). Monitors and workstations are provided by the IT department, all of which are the same. The customer evaluation team consists of the aforementioned IT guy, police or security personnel, physical plant and the Project Manager. The team is given a score sheet upon which they are to rate on a scale of 1-10 the best (in their opinions) picture in several controlled lighting situations and all cameras are viewing the same scene.
Note that this is only one of the many factors in evaluation of the system overall.
The object of the game is to choose the camera only from among those proposed by the integrator. Or, in another situation, the highest scoring manufacturer would be specified for the project.
I have camera manufacturers tell me all the time they would be happy to participate in such a gig.
What do you think? What changes would you suggest? Have you ever gone through this exercise?