I normally don't comment much about cameras, but I've just been working on a camera that has amazed me with it's performance : the Sanyo VCC-HD4000
This camera is a fixed, 4 megapixel HD camera with 10x zoom lens that retails for around us$900-950 : for example see SecurityIdeas
Currently Netcam Watcher supports JPEG mode ; we are working on H.264 using Sanyo's SDK
The thing that amazed me is the image quality; for instance it can capture the license plate on a moving vehicle at 200 meters.
Here are some sample images at a fairly low resolution
This is at the wide end of the zoom.

This is zoomed in half way:

This is zoomed in all the way:

And this is a high resolution shot of it zoomed all the way, capturing
licence plates on vehicles moving at about 50km/h or 30mph:

Usually IP cameras are no good at all at this sort of thing. See for instance the Panasonic HCM-280 attempting the same sort of thing:

For such a high resolution camera, the performance is quite good. Here are the frame rates you get in Netcam Watcher at various resolutions and image quality settings:
2288x1712 normal 2.63 FPS, superfine 1.67 FPS
1280x960 normal : 6 FPS, superfine : 4.33 FPS
1024x768 normal : 9.33 FPS, superfine : 6.3 FPS
800x600 normal : 14.7 FPS, superfine : 10 FPS
The camera also has good low light performance, as good as any. It switched to b/w in night mode, but the image quality is again good.
The camera comes with a bunch of interesting features, a privacy mask, recording to SD card or to an external hard disk. IMHO a pretty darned good camera.
If you need a high resolution camera, this could be the answer.
Continue reading "Sanyo VCC-HD4000 Review"