WestPoint · Cameras · i-PRO
i-PRO comes from Panasonic, and it is still obsessed with the difficult image.
The old Panasonic security division, today a company of its own. Few ranges, very carefully made, meant for places where the image has to serve as evidence. It is not cheap and it does not pretend to be.
What kind of manufacturer it is.
An image manufacturer, in the literal sense: what it looks after is the quality of what gets recorded before the length of the catalogue.
It comes from a Japanese imaging electronics house and you can tell in the priorities: sensitivity with little light, handling of movement without smearing, and colour that stays recognisable when the light drops. These are things that do not stand out on a data sheet and that decide whether a face is any use on the day a video has to be handed over.
The second thing that defines it is that it takes the security of the equipment itself seriously: who can change its firmware and what it identifies itself with on the network. Where the customer's IT people approve everything that gets plugged in, that saves meetings.
What it sacrifices is price and breadth. The catalogue is short, there is no entry range meant to compete on price, and the installed base in Spain is smaller than that of the best selling brands — which matters for replacement lead times, it is not a fault of the product.
Where it behaves well.
Where the image has to serve as evidence. Till areas, cash counts, counters, a gaming room, a lobby with a lot of traffic: places where seeing that somebody went past is not enough —you have to be able to say who it was and what they had in their hands— and where the light is artificial, mixed and worse than it looks.
In scenes with movement and little light it also holds up well. A person walking down a badly lit corridor comes out with less smearing, and that is the difference between a recognisable face and a head-shaped smudge. This is where the difference in price is paid, and where it is justified.
And in installations with demanding network requirements: a hospital, banking, transport, a public body with its own systems department. The equipment stands that examination without anyone having to ask for odd exceptions on the firewall.
Where we would not put it.
At most of the points of a normal installation, and it is worth saying it that plainly.
On the perimeter of an industrial unit, an outdoor car park or a warehouse aisle where all that is asked is to see that somebody goes past and which way, this brand is above what the scene needs. The money goes further putting the good camera at the three points that matter and a decent mid range at the other fifteen.
Nor in large installations with a fixed, tight budget per camera, because there the sum does not work out and ending up cutting the number of points to keep the brand is the worse of the two possible mistakes.
And not as the only brand of an installation that is going to grow in a disorderly way, where what will be needed most is finding a particular model at two days' notice. The large catalogues are better for that, and saying so is part of the job.
The analytics it carries inside, and where they stop.
It carries analytics in the unit and allows applications installed inside, its own and third party ones: classifying people and vehicles, counting, detecting intrusion into a zone, reading number plates. It does it on a good footing, because the detector starts from a better image: half of all analytics fail because of a bad image and not a bad algorithm, and that shows up at once outdoors at night.
The limit, even so, is the usual one. The camera sees its own field of view and applies rules that can be drawn: a line, a zone, a time. It does not relate what happens on two cameras, it does not remember yesterday and it does not understand a situation that will not fit into a rule.
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 exactly what the camera does not do: understanding the scene and relating it to the rest of the installation. And the opposite is worth saying too — in a till area with a good image and a simple rule, the camera on its own does the job.
What we do.
- Sharing out the budget before the brand: which points need to identify somebody and which points only need to see that somebody goes past. The first ones command the good equipment; the second ones must not drag it along.
- The lens and the distance worked out for the detail needed at the exact place, which in these applications is usually one particular square metre —the mouth of the till, the passage through the turnstile— and not the whole field of view.
- The light, which indoors is half the problem. Sometimes the answer is not the camera: it is changing two light fittings, and it comes out much cheaper.
- The setting up with the scene in operation and not in an empty room: with people going past, at the busiest hour and at the hour when it is left alone.
- The maintenance: firmware with judgement, the customer's passwords, cleaning the dome —a dirty bubble ruins the dearest sensor— and a check of the field of view at every visit.
The angle and the height are not decided at fitting time.
Where the image has to identify somebody there is a rule that gets forgotten: the higher the camera goes, the prettier the general shot and the less face you see. A dome in the middle of the room at four metres gives no usable face at all.
The angle, the height and the light decide for good what will be possible with that image, so they are settled in the project and not on the day of fitting. It is the cheapest part of the installation and the only one that cannot be corrected afterwards without paying for the labour again.
Where to go next.
Before choosing a brand you have to decide what is asked of each image: to see, to recognise or to identify. They do not cost the same.
Get started
Do you need a face to come out of that image?
Tell us which points have to serve as evidence, how far away they are and what light they work in. With that we will tell you where this brand pays off, where it does not, and whether the problem is fixed sooner with two light fittings than with a dearer camera.