by john adam s
As Wazir opens the box, he pulls out a booklet, a CD, 2 power supplies – one for the NVR and one for the PoE, and a remote control. “See how the PoE cord is built into the NVR? What makes this different is that you are not going to need an external PoE switch and there’s no external network setup required,” he says. “The only time you will need to set up a switch is if you are going out onto an existing network. But if you want to do a standalone 4-8 camera system, it’s plug-and-play with no external devices – it’s really an IP version of a DVR.” On the rear there are audio inputs and outputs, some physical inputs and outputs, eSATA and an HDMI monitor port. There are also a couple of USB ports on the front of the unit. The system we play with uses a wireless mouse with a wireless USB plugged into one of the front ports, making for a most elegant solution. EasyIP comes as a package because the manufacturer makes the NVRs and the cameras and the system’s overall ability to configure itself depends on that proprietary connection between cameras and NVR. The cameras in question are nice Kobi units with a good feel to them, excellent specifications and a sharp price point. There are going to be about 6 cameras in the range, Wazir says. Now we get into the install and happily for me, it’s very simple. The power supplies are different sizes so there’s no chance of getting them in the wrong places. We get out the fixed dome cameras and plug them into the NVR using short Cat-5 cables. The HDMI cable goes from the NVR to the HD monitor above the work bench and the mouse plugs into the front of the unit via the USB. It’s all super straightforward. When we plug the cameras in, the system immediately goes to work and a ‘connecting’ message appears on the screen and after a minute of configuration in the background, the camera images themselves appear. Effortless. By far the easiest IP Video installation I’ve ever done. “You now have IP cameras working on an NVR and you have not had to select any ports, you’ve not had to set IP addresses. You simply plug the cameras in and away the system goes,” Wazir explains. “Once the system is set up you do have to set recording resolution and motion detection and you can play with image quality but all these functions are just the same as they are on any DVR – just point and click.” Next we go upstairs to drive the CMS software. The boys have set up a separate 8-camera unit in the board room for us to play with. The management solution is basic and functional and in this application it’s driving a mix of IP and analogue cameras via the 8-input Kobi NVR with one camera coming in via a Kobi DVR just to show the ease of integrating other Kobi products. Up to 64 of these
Now we have gone to IP we find the installers used to the analogue gear are finding it very difficult to make the transition, setting up networks and switchers is too much for many of them. machines can be connected to the Kobi CMS, which in this case is operating on a laptop, giving a lot of room for expansion if you want to use it. The GUI is simple. There’s record, continuous record, alarm and pre-alarm recording, motion and panic recording. Recorded information is accessed via a timeline and can be searched by date. It’s simple but everything is there. There are single frame, 4 frame, 9 frame screen options. You can make notes in the screenshots and archive events to USB, or to desktop. There’s also a speaker and a microphone allowing communication with camera points if this is set up. “A good feature is that when you view a camera on playback the system displays all the cameras that were recording at that time giving you incidental footage. A lot of other systems will only show you one camera, this shows them all,” Wazir tells me. We go into the software and run through setup of a camera and once again it’s extremely easy to
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