Examining Arecont Vision's Performance Claims

SecuritySquared has an interview with Arecont's VP of Sales NA [link no longer available]. Arecont provides a straightforward sales pitch on the benefits of megapixel and H.264.

The 2 aspects that I would flag are (1) the bandwidth benefits relative to MJPEG and (2) the bandwidth difference compared to VGA.

Arecont's H.264 is not very efficient during high motion or low lighting (see our Arecont test) and is nowhere close to the 6x savings Arecont cites in the interview. Indeed, Arecont's H.264 tends to be less efficient than other's MJPEG in low light (see our StarDot test).

Arecont also makes a point about their 2MP cameras being in the 'same ballpark' of about 2.5 Mb/s for bandwidth consumption as VGA cameras (at about the 7 minute mark). I am not sure how this could be the case in a fair comparison (Arecont H.264 2MP vs H.264 VGA camera, same frame rate). The VGA camera would still easily be half or less than the 2MP (easily).