If you think either are easy from a sales / business perspective, you are deluding yourself.
John, I recall that when I made a decision to join my last employer back in 2005 it was a five-person startup with zero market share. That was a few hundred million dollars in sales ago... The first multi-sensor panoramic cameras I designed were introduced at ISC West 2006. Everyone finally caught up by ISC West 2015, and this market segment I predict will grow to quarter billion annually within five years. Like they say, "There is no substitute for experience" :)
(1) You are not claiming to provide super high-resolution continuously. Your conventional super high res competitors (like Avigilon) are. You force users to request processing on-demand, connecting to a cloud service with unclear VMS integration. This reduces the value and increases the complexity versus a 'regular' super high-resolution camera.
Nobody in video surveillance ever needed the entire field of view captured and streamed at the highest resolution. This is done out of necessity because there are no other options. You are paying for it in camera cost, bandwidth and storage cost, power and heat, reduced frame rate, poor low light performance... and all of that is entirely wasted except for a small region of interest! Resolution on demand is a much better value proposition. The Moore's Law does not apply to image sensors and lenses, they don't scale in cost over time -- don’t expect an 8K camera and beyond to become available for $200. That is essentially what we are setting out to do.
(2) The claim about comparable value being 30-50 more expensive does not make sense. Let's say the comparable is an Arecont Pro camera at ~$6,000 to $10,000. This implies you are selling your cameras at $200 each with no recurring cost. I don't believe you can or will price your products at this level.
Entropix cameras will be priced well within the regular commodity camera price range. Nothing in the new camera architecture suggests high cost.
(3) More importantly, the 30-50 times claim ignores the point that almost no one chooses to pay $6,000 to $10,000 per camera (the market share of those cameras are something like 0.01%). Those cameras are not overall very attractive in the marketplace.
Exactly my point. Their market share is tiny, and they are not attractive at that price. Imagine if you could get comparable image quality and image detail at the price of a 1080 camera, and have that at 30 fps with great low light performance and WDR...
It's neat but very few people are going to see it as delivering 30-50 times more value than the 4K / 12MP cameras that are already shipping and are not going to require a cloud service and requesting for processing each time they want increased resolution.
The 30-50x value comparison was not in relation to 4K- 12 MP cameras, but to 7K/8K cameras and beyond. If you expect that a low-cost small optical format 4K - 12 MP camera gives you 4K - 12 MP effective resolution, then make sure it is a bright sunny day at 100,000 Lux. Otherwise you may be getting the same or worse than a 1080 camera resolution due to small-pixel low SNR and poor dynamic range, please refer to Fig 1 in the paper I linked to in my earlier post. Even some of IPVM's own tests seem to point in the same direction.
I respect what you are doing on the technology side but you seem to be greatly underestimating the business challenges of taking this to market.
Thanks, John! All three of us, the founders of Entropix, have been cautioned about this very thing on a few earlier occasions in previous companies we launched or helped build. If only we listened.. :)