Smart Guard Systems Surveillance Solutions

Smart Hawk SHC 100M/SHC 100MW

Smart Hawk SHC 100M/SHC 100MW is a 1.3MP cube camera that comes with an in-built microphone, 6 IR LEDs for low light environment and event detection LED. It offers high image quality video in MJPEG/MPEG4 codec format and offers 5 image resolutions (PAL/NTSC) --SXGA XGA, VGA, QVGAand QQVGA.

The product comes with IP Finder software which helps in automatically detecting the IP camera over the network. However, the IP Finder can only detect the IP addresses of the cameras that share the same hub on the LAN. The product uses the AciveX Control to play images and sound on your PC. For this, IE security setting level should be changed to 'medium' in IE browser. If you are using Firefox or Chrome web browsers, you have to install an IE plug-in.

Once installed, the camera operation interface appears on the IE browser. The Live View tab gives you real time viewing option and option for selecting video format, screen view size, streaming options (UDP, TCP and HTTP) and picture control (brightness, hue, contrast, saturation). Talking about streaming options, UDP provides the fastest transmission service through UDP port (50000-60000) but video fragments may occur due to poor transmission quality. HTTP is recommended as it allows the video stream to go through network firewalls.

The image motion detection functionality works to the best. The settings allow you to catch the finest of object movements and even capture images and videos. This can be configured in the 'Setting' tab of the dashboard where scheduled and triggered event functionality can also be configured. The surveillance system also gives you the option to create multiple users with different set of privileges to administer the surveillance system. With wireless functionality, Smart Hawk is a good package to go for at the price available. The PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) functionality, however, is what you are going to miss on.

Smart Micro SMN100 NVR

Smart Micro NVR is used to add the functionality of recording videos in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive or other mass storage device connected using a USB 2.0 port directly. It can be connected to a network via Gigabit Ethernet.

The setup includes a simple LAN connection between the Smart Hawk camera and Smart Micro NVR. The external device on which the video is to be recorded can be connected through the USB port. Switching on the power, the camera will start sending the video stream to external storage device connected to SMN100. The videos get recorded in the form of 3 minute clips and in the .mp4 format, each clip occupying approx 9MB of memory space . The duration of the clip can be set as desired. One important point that should be taken care of is to turn off the NVR before removing the connected external HDD or any other storage device. Also, it is advisable to format the HDD before connecting it to the NVR. Overall, Smart Micro NVR when bundled with Smart Hawk SCH100M/SCH100MW makes for a useful surveillance solution.

Bottomline: If pan/tilt/zoom features are not a requirement, Smart Hawk when bundled with Smart Micro NVR make a feature enriched IP surveillance solution at the given price.