Samsung Launching 1280H Analog, Claims HD Quality

I'll let Ethan answer the technical questions.

As for Samsung keeping a straight face, listen, they didn't start this craziness. There's been a number of manufacturers bizarrely pumping 960H, even though their own marketing material shows that it's stretched out.

Take this from the first video I found on YouTube for 960H:

Obviously, the scene is stretched out on 960H - both the guy and the pillar are much wider. Also, and this is just a rookie mistake, the FoVs are skewed, with the D1 tilted to the right relative to the 960H.

Another example, Q-See's documentation shows a 960H vs D1 matchup, where the car in the middle of the FoV is clearly stretched out in the 960H shot.

I really have no idea why they are trying to pass off such obvious nonsense, short of that they think their customers are suckers...

Well, we don't know for sure it's the same as 960H. So I'll answer based on what I've seen in our 960H tests.

1. The megapixel sensors do seem to make a difference in image quality. I believe in order to take advantage of it, though, you need a cleaner digital/analog conversion in the DVR. This is why "normal" D1 DVRs don't see much of an improvement from high TVL cameras.

2. All ports on these DVRs are 960H (or 1280H). It's simply the capture resolution that's set. You can change them to D1 or QCIF or 960H, as we did in our analog vs. IP testing.

960H and presumably 1280H is a capture format, not a transmission format. NTSC is NTSC is NTSC. But once that video hits the capture card it can be captured at whatever resolution you want, including 1280x480. You could record it at 16MP if you want. It's just questionable benefit. That's what's really strange here. We've seen practical benefits to high TVL cameras, and the quality is quite a bit better than standard 450-600TVL models. So capturing it at a resolution above D1 may have some benefit...but why they choose to stretch this good quality video, we do not understand.

3. Are you talking about loop-thru inputs? Typically the DVRs we've seen haven't included them at all. I think since analog has shifted downmarket, people aren't expecting them near as much as they used to, so manufacturers are removing them to save a few dollars on the recorder. The 960H DVRs we have have none, but do have a couple spot monitor outputs.

If you are still installing NEW analog systemstoday you should not be in buisness, because you clearly don't know what you're doing. End of!!!!

That's been pretty much my thinking but I've worked with some integrators who argue that the analog systems are less expensive and thats why they use them.

I wonder how many of us are telling customers that analog is "old tech" and they need to be going IP to stay current in technology? Has IPVM ever done a survey on that question?

As I said above, we don't know for sure. It's not released yet. However, we were told by Samsung themselves that this is similar to 960H, just with "more pixels", and from our tests (and others I've seen), 960H is stretching D1 video. The output format of the camera is NTSC composite video. NTSC composite video is 4:3. So if this is truly analog video, and not some magic new format, they're stretching it.

My guess is that they are finding a way to take a cropped 8:3 image from the sensor, squeeze it down to the 4:3 NTSC signal, transmit that via analog signal to the DVR, where it gets corrected back to 8:3.

Jon, maybe there is a nub of speck of truth somewhere in there, otherewise the bar has just been lowered (and we're not limboing)...

Do you agree with this simple test to catch the stretch? Who ever has one of these things should capture some scene with known size references and no motion, like the one John shared above, and then just turn the camera 90 degrees and recapture. If some objects gets twice as tall and half as wide and some the opposite happens, it probably a scam... Yes/No?

Probably Ethan has already done this test on the 960H's.

Jon, the spec sheet for the 1280H dome lists the sensor as follows:

It appears to be a 'regular' CMOS chip, not a 'super wide' one.

As to them doing a special transmission technique, they did not say that to us, but perhaps. We'll know this summer when they are released what the image performance really is.

Lol @ secret sauce...

Jon, do you remember Covi? I think they did something like that. If I recall correctly, they combined multiple 'SD' fields / frames into a single HD one using NTSC. I don't know if it's anything like that though...

Good comparison to CVI. There are two major differences between CVI and 960H / 1280H:

• CVI is digital transmission, not analog
• CVI encodes 'full' megapixel resolution, not 960 x 480 or 1280 x 480.

There are similarities of course - both use coax, both are not IP, in particular.

We are tracking CVI closely and are mainly looking for the right CVI product to test, as CVI products options expand through and Dahua and their OEMs.

Xishan,

The consultant aspect is interesting. If they can get consultants to require 1280 x 480 resolution, regardless of actual performance, it would help knock out the competition.

I believe Samsung is the lost horse in IP race !

Xishan, can you clarify your Samsung statement? Has Samsung lost its way in the IP race, or lost the IP race, or maybe is the last horse finishing/running?

How are they doing in the 'Analogue Race', and who is winning?

Are you meaning that 1280H is an indication of their resignation in the IP market? Are they afraid of cannibalizing their IP line?