CCTV: a nice little earner for the IT crowd

Friday, September 10th, 2010

If you take look at the product portfolio of a networking company such as Cisco, there are some things that you would never have imagined seeing a decade ago. The diversity is pretty immense and includes storage, applications servers, teleconferencing services such as WebEx, and even home wireless audio gizmos from its Linksys brand.  Yet one of the most interesting is video – and specifically, CCTV.

The UK has between two and four million CCTV cameras in operation. It’s hard to pin the exact number down as there is no requirement to register them, so figures are based on somewhat flaky sales data. What is certain is that the bulk of these cameras use analogue technology which causes a lot of problems in terms of quality, accessibility and reliability.

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, February 6th, 2009

A week heavy on peripherals saw a video camera with an ultra-slow-motion mode, Dell’s entry into the fledgling pico-projector market, a mouse which reads your palm and one of the cheapest PC and monitor bundles we’ve ever seen.

Jumping killer whales and pico blues

Sanyo’s HD2000 pistol-grip camcorder has a special trick – it can record 1080p video at 60fps, and can even reach 600fps for those Planet Earth-style animal action shots if you don’t mind sub-YouTube resolutions. Its video quality may not quite reach excellence but its all-in-one ability to take good video and stills makes it a strong choice at a good price.

Another strong choice, but at a more premium price, was the superb LaCie 324 monitor. The 24in panel displays 92% of the NTSC gamut, and during our tests it had cooing crowds gathered around it as the ultimate endorsement. Bringing images alive in a way standard monitors just can’t match, it earned a deserved recommendation for professionals.

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Christmas came and went, New Year flew past with a bang but PC Pro’s reviews kept on coming. We’ve much catching up to do with this week’s round-up, so we’ll keep the focus on the most notable of the twenty-plus reviews since the festive period.

New Year’s entertainment

We got unfeasibly possessive over a little media player in the Labs, thanks to the fabulous AMOLED screen on Cowon’s S9. It shared so many strengths with the iPod Touch, but with its individually lit pixels – no backlight required – it breathed new life into those iPlayer programmes we’d saved over Christmas. A truly stunning screen and a very nice little device.

On the subject of screens, the oddly named Village Tronic ViBook arrived to extend the life of our old office TFTs. It attaches to the back and converts any display to work over DisplayLink – essentially USB – to run multiple monitors without the need for multiple video outputs. Will 2009 be the year of DisplayLink?

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