Good morning, Yesterday, in the wind and rain, three men braved the elements and attended the event that was IFSEC 2013 at the Birmingham NEC.
Despite huge delays on the southbound M6 due to continued roadworks (filling the many many potholes I believe!) we made good time and arrived shortly after the doors opened. A quick queue to get our passes printed and we were in.
The first thing that struck us was the sheer size of some of the stands from the major players. The cost of these stands must have been greater than the total annual turnover of some of the companies that were attending the show and shows the power that some of the marketing departments wield. They were truly a sight to behold, with their shiny equipment and well turned out ‘sales’ staff.
We found the huge majority of staff on the exhibitors stands pleasant and very well informed (as one would expect) with very little to separate the major companies in terms of price and performance. What did surprise us though was just how close the ‘lesser; companies were in terms of hardware design, with some truly innovative products about to hit the market (I may cover these in a separate article at some point in the near future).
Last year seemed to be all about IP CCTV with virtually every stand exhibiting some form of IP hardware. This year was very different with HD-SDI seeming to push the boundaries of CCTV.
For me HD-SDI is the future of CCTV products for the vast majority of installations, due to the fact that it is going to be very easy to migrate existing installations onto HD-SDI CCTV due to the similarities between both systems; Cable infrastructures are the same, and existing SD cameras can be utilised on an HD-SDI system with the addition of a simple signal converter. In fact one of the most impressive ‘gadgets’ we saw was on the Genie stand and effectively converts 4 analogue SD camera signals into a single HD-SDI channel with zero loss of quality. Think about it…… an existing client with a large number of analogue SD cameras who wants the benefit of one or two HD sources without tying themselves into a hybrid machine with a fixed number of SD and HD channels can now have their cake and eat it.
However its not all good news! Due to the sheer amount of bandwidth required by the HD signals, the hardware, at this point in time, is not quite up to the task in real-time across all channels, with most devices offering maximum frame rates of 10-15 FPS at 1080p (720p will quite happily record at 25 – 30 fps, but who wants a full 1080p system only to have to turn it down to 720p to get real time recording!?) I predict that in the next 12 months the price of HD-SDI will drop considerably making it a viable alternate to existing analogue installs, whilst at the same time the technology will catch up with the spec sheets and offer real time recording across all channels at 1080p
So to recap I was both impressed and dissapointed at the same time with HD-SDI, but expect to be totally blown away by the time IFSEC 2014 comes round.
On a final note, whilst wandering around we came across this beast! an 84″ Ultra HD 4K TV.
The output of this panel was truly breathtaking, and needless to say, I WANT ONE!
