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The Last Word
The Last Word... Another issue of Benchmark over, and what have we learned? t is only fair to say that every manufacturer out there wants to sell more products, and if there is a feature or function that they can call their own, then they’re always going to exploit that. While for the customer ‘proprietary’ often indicates that you are going to end up with a system limited by devices that share that single element, for the manufacturer it represents the ‘buy-in’ that they want us to make. It would be churlish to consider such an approach as negative. After all, it happens across a wide number of sectors, including the consumer sector. The real issue is to understand when such an approach moves from being a case of trying to establish a competitive edge to being restrictive and potentially misleading for the customer. The security sector loves a specification sheet. Often there is information added to
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these documents purely with the intention of countering claims made by another competitive product. If you know your way around the industry, you can often pick out specific details which have clearly been included to make a point about another product that the reader of the spec might also be considering. The point of concern often doesn’t come from what manufacturers have stated. It comes more from they haven’t stated. When it comes to product descriptions, the law makes a point of highlighting what a customer would consider ‘reasonable’. If those buying the product might reasonably expect something to be the case, then not mentioning it isn’t the case isn’t good enough. We agree with such thinking; the industry should be able to trust manufacturers to be fully open about product limitations!
Next Month in Benchmark... Bandwidth (Part 2) Bandwidth is something that the video surveillance sector craves. As resolutions rise, so does the need for bandwidth. There are many theories surrounding the best approach to bandwidth management; do the theories stack up in the real world? Benchmark puts them to test to see how image quality is impacted.
Access Control Network-based technology is everywhere, but is it essential to take access control forwards? Benchmark considers the options.
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Video Analytics There are many who are quick to extol the virtues of video analytics, pointing out the benefits when securing a site. However, given the wide range of variables associated with most applications, might it be the case that video analytics is better off being preserved for business-related tasks? Benchmark considers the role of the technology.