WestPoint · Cameras · IDIS
IDIS configures itself if everything is IDIS. That is where its charm and its limit are.
Korean. It makes the camera, the recorder and the software, and it makes them recognise each other with hardly any configuration, with no licence per camera and with long warranties. The more mixed the installation is, the less of an advantage it has.
What kind of manufacturer it is.
One of the few that makes the whole chain and sells it as a single thing.
The camera, the recorder and the software come from the same house and are meant to find each other on their own: you connect the unit and it appears in the system without any fighting over addresses or users. That, which seems a small thing, is hours of commissioning and mistakes that do not get made.
The second thing is the commercial model: the management software is not paid for per camera and the warranties are long. In a chain with forty shops, what that changes is not the purchase price: it is the annual invoice and the number of calls.
What it sacrifices is specialisation. It is not the house to go to for the impossible point, nor the one that goes furthest in analytics, and its advantage thins out as soon as the installation gets mixed with other people's equipment and software.
Where it behaves well.
In repeated installations: shop chains, branches, clinics, schools, gyms, large residential blocks. Places of between eight and sixty cameras where there is no IT person, where every site is to be seen from the same application and where replacing a unit has to be swapping it and nothing more.
And where the customer wants the system to be genuinely theirs: searching, exporting and setting up a user without ringing the installer. That depends more on the simplicity of the software than on any feature of the camera, and here it is sorted.
Where we would not put it.
The rule is simple: when the chain breaks, the advantage disappears.
If the video software is already decided and comes from another house, or if the installation has to live with cameras from three brands, you pay for the convenience of a closed system and then use it as if it were open. There are better options there.
Nor at the difficult points —strong backlight, reading a number plate, almost no light— nor in large control centres with integration to access control, intruder detection and third party systems, where what is asked of the platform is another league.
The analytics it carries inside, and where they stop.
It brings what an installation of this kind needs: intrusion into zones, line crossing, telling people from vehicles on the range that carries it, and an alert to the application. Well adjusted, that covers ninety per cent of what is asked for in a shop or a clinic.
The limit is the usual one: rules drawn over the image, each camera on its own, and nothing that understands a situation. In retail that shows up at once, because what is really of interest —how people move, what happens in the queue, why nobody goes down that aisle— is not drawn with a line.
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 that: understanding what happens in the scene and turning it into operational data. They sit together with no trouble over the same cameras. And if what is needed is to record well and alert on an intrusion in the small hours, the system on its own already does it.
What we do.
- A standard design for the repeated site, with the same camera in the same place in all of them: a chain with twenty different shops costs twenty times more to maintain.
- The choice of the point where the image has to serve as evidence —the till, the door— and, if need be, a better camera there even if it breaks the uniformity.
- The recording plan: how many days are really kept, what happens when a drive breaks and how a video comes out for an insurer or for the police.
- The training of whoever is going to use it, which in these installations is half the project: searching, exporting and what to do when something does not turn up.
- The maintenance: firmware, the customer's passwords, the state of the drives and a check of the field of view at every visit, because in a shop the fittings get moved every season.
The angle and the height are not decided at fitting time.
In retail the camera gets put where it is out of sight, and that way half of what has been paid for is lost: a dome in the middle of the shop at three and a half metres sees heads and baskets, not faces. Whoever has to come out identified goes through the door and past the till, and that is where a camera goes at face height and with the light in front, not backlit by the shop window.
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 of the premises, and not on the day of fitting.
Where to go next.
The area covers what does not change with the brand: what detail is needed, how long it is kept and who can look and export.
Get started
Many identical sites and nobody in IT?
That is the scenario where this house has something to offer. Tell us how many sites there are, how many cameras at each one and who is going to use the system, and we will tell you what standard design we propose and at which point it is worth stepping outside it.