PC Based Sales?

[CCTV Blog Admin]

Are you finding that most PC based DVR sales are going down? It seems that consumers as a whole are requesting more and more stand alone type DVRs. I was just wondering if anyone had an opinion on this.

[David]

I would tend to agree... I think most people either had a bad experience or don't want to mess with their PC's. Either the setup was difficult, or it didn't work with their PC platform, or they just gave up. Me personally, the furthest I'd go on my box is a single USB input.

The nice thing about stand alone units are that they are getting cheaper, they are fairly simple to setup. Another cool feature you are seeing more of is the manufacturer will provide a DDNS account for remote access directly to the end user. Then they don't have to go and get their own static IP address and go through all that.

Anyone else have input?

[Nate]

Vista and the host of problems and deluge of petty annoyances caused by that Satanic operating system have literally driven some people mad. PCs are also becoming more and more used as multiple platform entertainment/office machines. Some users who invest in high end PCs may well just want to leave it as a PC and not add anything else to it, given that DVRs are coming down in price all the time and a dedicated standalone DVR with a huge hard disk is very attractive compared to attaching it to a PC and having OS issues, HDD space issues, and other oddball issues crop up.

[Walter Young]

It would depend on the type of customer that you speak of. Entry level priced customers, and entry level DIY are going to gravitate to 4 channel DVRs that are cheap, and easy to get. Many of these customers pay the price in the end where they have bought off the internet, and the high volume low priced website provides no tech support leaving a lot of buyers in a frenzy when they have networking problems, ground loop issues, or they are running 12 volts beyond the capacity of the wiring. Another problem is the use of wide angle cameras with "packaged deals". The wide angle lens has the distance distortion leaving the customer without "facial recognition". They suffer this along with poor camera placement.

Mom and Pop Dealers are going to use the cheapest DVR that can give them the most mark up.
This could be an AVTech DVR, Avermedia, or an Eclipse provided DVR.

The higher up the "food chain" the more you will see PC based DVRs being used. This may have to do with multi platform issues such as adding license plate recognition, or electronic access integration.

PC base DVRs are enjoyed for the plug and play repair. If you lose a power supply, then you have no problem, just pop one in. Loose a DVR card? No problem, just pop one in!

Stand alone DVRs are difficult for repairs in the entry priced market. Mom and Pop dealers have to have a few DVRs on "stand by" for loaners should a system go down. Most entry level DVRs are built all on one board. These customers have to send the DVR back through their distribution chain for repair/replacement.
The decision of the "dealer" on selecting distributor can have a big impact. Imagine a dealer in Florida who has to ship the DVR back to California! That is 5 day there, and 5 days back plus bench time! If the Florida dealer has a Miami distributor then they have a one day there, and back plus bench time.

The four channel DVRs has really opened the eyes of the average consumer, and that is what is driving the DVR market.

There are those DIY who buy $45.00 DVR card from Echo Bay, and slap them in a Wally World $500.00 PC.
I would not quailify this as a DVR. Those DIY customers are probably having a hard time keeping up with their systems.

I think economics is the true driver of Stand Alone versed PC DVRs.

If they can ever sell a $50.00 IP camera at wholesale, and a dealer can retail it in the $100.00 to $150.00 range then you are going to see a mad migration to IP cameras if there is a plug n play NVR!

What do you think?

[CCTV Blog Admin]

I agree to some degree. PC based DVR's are no longer synonymous with low pricing. Even at best with a VIA chipset which is a no no and the cheapest of components you cannot touch the price of a stand alone DVR anymore.

You have a valid point on repairs. However, you also don't have the issues with stand alone that you have with PC. A standard Windows PC takes 4 gigs of operating system alone. 4 Freaken GIGS! Just to run the operating system. Then you add viruses, users getting into systems, power supply failures, and the million other windows related issues and trade off is well worth it. Stand alone systems are limited usually in features and the problem does exist when you have to repair the product but you also have to consider that you will be repairing stand alone units less often and most stand alone systems are very stable. I am a PC guy at heart I really am but the technology is no longer viable.

The IP theory makes some sense but its hype more than anything. Bandwidth will always be an issue and whats the point of having IP cameras when you have to drop the frame rate and resolution to accommodate your bandwidth. There is a place for IP in the market but I do not see it replacing DVRs. I do see however cameras being used as DVRs. Single cameras with 120gb hard drives that will allow local recording and transmission. This has more of chance than just IP.

Thanks

[Walter Young]

Looks like us analog types will be employed just a little longer than we thought!

[John Honovich]

This is an interesting discussion. I will comment more when I get back from my meetings.

Quick question: How cheap are 16 ch, 500GB DVRs being sold for today, end user pricing?

It is $3,000? Even lower?

[Walter Young]

Wholesale, or retail?

On this site do we only post retail?

[CCTV Blog Admin]

Retail. Lets keep everyone protected as much as possible.

[CCTV Blog Admin]

The truth is that depending on what you are looking for 16ch, 120fps systems, MPEG4 are extremely low priced now days. Especially with low end DVRs. $3000.00 is very high for some out there. IP and analytics have a place in the industry, there is no doubt in my mind but (analog) systems are better priced and make allot more sense. By the way why does everyone use the term analog systems? Its kind of like the topic Walter brought up on terminology. The truth is IP cameras are all analog. They simply get converted at the camera instead of at the DVR. Its the same thing. No diffrent. That just shows you how well the marketing for IP cameras is. They talk about digital and how there cameras are digital but in reality they are analog just like any standard CCD. What makes more sense? Converting all the signals in one place that will allow one compressed stream to be sent via the network or compressing the signals individually at every camera and sending all the data from every camera through the network? I think its obvious. The tendency is to argue that you can drop the frame rate or res. on the cameras to make up for bandwidth issues but once again, why? You spend triple the price for an IP camera only to not be able to use it to its capacity? OK. This makes sense. I know you can set it to motion or schedule and all that stuff but the truth is if you use 16 ( analog ) cameras and you convert them to digital at the DVR you can have higher res., better frame frame rate, higher quality and no bottle neck on your network and control all your settings for each individual camera just like an IP camera. Once again, there is a place for IP but lets be real here and admit that IP as its being marketed and sold is not true. Misconception in this industry is always a problem. Look at how people market CIF, QCIF, D1, DVD quality, High Res.. Manufacturers are always misleading dealers and wording things in a way that is confusing and not admirable. It just amazing to me that people actually swallow most of this stuff. WOW.

[GT Surveillance]

CCTV Blog Admin wrote, "They talk about digital and how there cameras are digital but in reality they are analog just like any standard CCD."

Here is an area where customers get really confused. The entire industry seriously needs to get together someplace and decide upon terminology.

If you use actual camera parlance, anything with a CCD is digital. CCD is an imaging sensor - and imaging sensors are 'digital' in nature. Essentially, an imaging sensor takes in light, analyzes the hue and the tone and then assigns a numerical value to each pixel. CMOS works on the same principle - if it has an imaging sensor, that sensor analyzes the light and turns the light information into a number (actually a string of them, but I digress). This is the textbook definition of digital.

In camera terms, analogue refers to the physical reaction that occurs when an emulsifier is exposed to a source of light. Film is coated with three different emulsifiers - each one reacts to one of the primary colours. As light is allowed in through the aperture, these emulsifiers react according to the saturation of each primary colour. From there, you end up with very fine colour changes which our eye translates into an image with actual depth.

I have yet to see a surveillance camera that actually allows light to interact directly with film. They're all digital. Problem is, we get into little habits. Many of us use 'analogue' to mean wired.

[Nate]

Non ip based cameras output a composite video signal. Composite output from a cctv camera makes it analog. It's not a digital output like youd find on a network. Composite signals are inherently analog signals, not digital signals. Although you are correct, at the front end the sensor is completely digital and all internal processing occurs on a digital level. But at the backend, where the use must interact with it, it's all analog composite 1Vp-p signals.

[GT Surveillance]

I'm going to weigh in on behalf of the computer guys.

First, Vista is absolutely horrid and it makes me want to leave the entire industry. Here is a horror story. Two customers. Both running Vista (this was pre-SP 1). Both with roughly the same amount of power 'under the hood'. Two slightly different PC configurations - different mainboards, different RAM, different hard drives, both Intel Dual Core processors, different clockspeeds. Both with the exact same PCI based DVR. It worked perfectly for one customer. And it barely worked at all for the other. At face value, everything was the same and I'm still trying to figure out what happened. My suspicion is that the problem came down to the mainboards and the way the bios brought everything together. But that is just a guess because I'm still horribly confused - and I'm something of a computer guy. I can't imagine how some end users feel.

This isn't a Microsoft problem, it is a PC market problem. Fact is, with the number of parts manufacturers out there, there is an almost infinite number of hardware permutations. Some of these vendors are really good at writing drivers. Others (like Asus as of late) couldn't program a decent v1.0 BIOS if their lives depended on it. It is really too bad because Asus used to make great mainboards. It seems to me like after Hewlett Packard did away with their blue on blue case, Asus forgot how to program.

So, because the problems with Vista are being so well documented, lots of users are choosing to go the way of standalone DVRs. In my mind, this is the wrong strategy to take. Why not buy up the glut of technologically obsolete Pentium 4s out there that run XP (SP 2 please), bump everything up to 1gb of RAM, put in PCI cards, install some good graphics software, optimize everything to the nines, and sell them as complete DVR systems? Hook one of those babies up to a good quality UPS that will condition power and you have a rock solid system that provides way more utility and way more end value for the customer.

For me, it all comes down to repair. How many of you have tried getting a standalone DVR repaired? And what is the average wait? What happens to the poor end user who buys a standalone DVR from one of the (many) sketchy online dealers and then gets no support once the system breaks? The end user can try sending it back to the manufacturer for warranty work. And how long is that average wait? Based on my experience, 4 - 6 weeks is a good ballpark estimate. Now, a computer is really only five pieces. A power supply (these go all the time), a mainboard, RAM, a processor, and a hard drive. Everything else is optional. And, as long as you avoided the name brand trap, all five of these pieces are readily available almost anywhere. Even if you can't do the work yourself (you'd be surprised by how easy this stuff is to replace), any technician in the world should be able to get it fixed within a week. If not, get a new technician.

And finally, the last major advantage that computers have is the fact that everything is all in one place. Take a screen shot, dump it into a program like Photoshop (if you're smart enough to use Photoshop - personally, it makes me go grey), touch it up, clear it up, maybe use a bit of digital zoom, print it, and stick it up behind your till. Bang, your system did what it was supposed to do and gave you something to show your staff. "Next time this cat comes in, call the police." Thanks to the magic of USB, its not terribly hard to do that with a standalone DVR, but, for my money, what's the point of having that extra box in the middle?

My honest suspicion is that this problem comes down to the simple fact that lots of retailers/installers don't know how to sell a computer. People are still really scared of computers and frankly, I can't wait for that instinct to go away. My belief is that a lot of sales people pick up on 'computer fear' and steer customers right over to the standalone DVRs. "Here you go, have a har