WestPoint · Cameras · Dahua
Dahua gives you a lot of camera for the money. And there are two things to ask first.
The other giant of the sector: an enormous catalogue, a good ratio between what it costs and what it does, and plenty of innovation in cameras that raise the alert on their own. Before proposing it, one condition of the project and one of the installation have to be settled.
What kind of manufacturer it is.
It covers the whole catalogue —dome, bullet, motorised, multisensor, fisheye, thermal, recording, software— and it moves fast where there is competition. A lot of equipment sold under other names comes out of factories like this one, and it is worth knowing: sometimes the customer already has this electronics fitted with another brand on the housing.
What it puts first is performance per euro and availability. It also has two lines it is recognised for: the cameras that give colour with very little light and the ones that defend themselves with a floodlight and a siren. The second is one of the few things in this trade that prevent the problem instead of recording it.
What it sacrifices is the same thing as any catalogue this size: uniformity. There are three or four product levels that look alike from the outside and differ exactly where it hurts —backlight, night and service life— and the low range is genuinely low.
The condition that gets checked before proposing it.
There are organisations with restrictions or with a policy of their own on the use of this manufacturer: public authorities, some regulated sectors and companies whose parent or main customer asks it of them. It is not a judgement of ours and we do not enter the debate: for the project it is a condition, like the grade an insurer requires.
It gets checked before anything goes into a quotation, and it gets checked where the decision is made: purchasing, corporate security, legal or the tender specification. If the answer is no, you change brand and carry on — there are thirteen others on this list. Finding out afterwards, with the installation built, is the one scenario to avoid.
Where it behaves well.
In large, lightly watched outdoor areas: manoeuvring yards, open compounds, rear elevations, industrial estate perimeters, sites. There the combination of night colour and an audible alert with light changes the outcome, because almost everyone who comes in to see what there is leaves as soon as something speaks to them.
And in installations with many points and a tight budget, where the real alternative is not a dearer brand: it is having fewer cameras. The professional range behaves well in normal scenes and lets you cover the whole site with one brand, one application and one spare.
Where we would not put it.
And the second thing to ask, which is about the installation and not the manufacturer.
Cameras with a floodlight and a siren do not go just anywhere. On a frontage with neighbours or in a yard up against homes, a loudspeaker and a strobe going off at night bring a complaint in the first week. And if the alert is a voice addressing whoever goes past, you have to look at how people are told there are cameras there, which is compliance and not fitting.
Nor do we propose it for the points where the image has to identify somebody with certainty, or where the light is extreme, if the budget allows something else. And not as the only brand in an installation nobody is going to maintain: the catalogue turns over fast and replacing the same model five years later is not always possible.
The analytics it carries inside, and where they stop.
The range with analytics in the unit separates people and vehicles from the rest of the movement, counts, alerts on intrusion into a zone and sets off the floodlight and the siren by itself. Filtering by type of object is what stops a perimeter going off with every branch, and that decides whether anybody is still attending to the alerts in the third month.
The ceiling: these are rules drawn over the image and the camera only sees its own field of view. On top of that not every range carries the same thing, so what gets promised is tied to the model and not to the brand.
What comes now is a recommendation with an interest of our own, so it is declared: in the same house there is IRIS Neural, the NVMS from Infinity Neural, the other company in the group. It is our own product. We would rather you knew it by reading this line.
What it brings is understanding the scene and joining several cameras into a single story. And the other half, which is also true: for a yard with a night alert and a floodlight that comes on, the camera on its own does the job.
What we do.
- Putting the model and the range of each point in writing. With catalogues like these, a quotation without part numbers is the door the low range comes in through at the points that mattered.
- The lens, the height and the field of view worked out with the plan, and the detail that reaches the exact place where something has to be recognised.
- Where cameras with a floodlight and a siren do and do not go, and at what hour they switch on. A badly placed deterrent gets switched off within a week, and a deterrent camera that is switched off is an ordinary camera that was paid for at a higher price.
- Locking the equipment down: the customer's own passwords, unused services switched off, a separated camera network, no ports open to the outside and firmware up to date. On the most installed brands in the world this is not an extra.
- The setting up at night, the adjustment of the analytics with the scene running and, at every maintenance visit, the field of view of each camera and the state of the drives.
The angle and the height are not decided at fitting time.
The angle, the height and the light decide for good what will be possible with that image. It is settled in the project, with the plan and at the bad hour, and not on the day of fitting: afterwards it is only corrected by paying for the labour again.
Where to go next.
The area covers what does not change with the brand: what detail is needed, how long it is kept and what gets tested before calling an installation good.
Get started
Do you have a yard or an open compound that is left alone at night?
That is the scenario where this brand has something of its own to offer. Tell us what the place is like, what there is around it and whether you can use this manufacturer in your organisation, and we will tell you what can be built and what is not advisable.