On Test - ACTi CAM5230HP

We took delivery of an ACTi CAM5230HP network camera for testing. The ACTi CAM5230HP is a static MPEG-4 real-time streaming day/night camera supporting a host of features, so let’s take a closer look at them:
Installation
The camera is supplied with a 12VDC power supply and a range of appropriate terminal blocks. A simple case of wiring up the terminal block to the power supply and connecting brought the camera to life.
Configuration
When entering the camera for the first time we were confused to see the camera has two areas to input IP details. One area for the LAN and one area for the WAN. After some testing in the office it was found that if you input your details as a LAN IP address you will not be able to see your camera externally through the internet. To configure external access you must configure the camera with a WAN IP address.
Dynamic DNS and UPnP
At this point we like to take a look for some support for NAT configuration and dynamic public IP addressing.

We were worried that we couldn’t find support for Universal Plug N Play (UPnP). UPnP is a networking architecture that will automatically configure compatible networking devices to achieve zero configuration networking. Specifically, network cameras can automatically set their own firewall rules in the router to allow external access. Not having this functionaility may be detrimental to potential customers with little or no networking background.
The camera supports dynamic DNS configuration and comes with a host of different providers to choose from. This is essential for those customers who are have a dynamic public IP address. For more information about the dynamic DNS service please see our blog post: Dynamic DNS, or Do I Really Need a Static IP Address?
Browser Plug-ins
The camera requires an Active-X plug-in to be installed into a web browser to enable the playback of images. We found that there are two unique Active-X plug-ins dependent on the cameras video settings.
Supported Modes
The camera supports the following resolutions:
176×144 pixels
352×288 pixels
720×576 pixels
The ACTi CAM5230HP supports a frame-rate of up to 25fps across all resolutions.
Image Settings
The ACTi CAM5230HP supports a number settings for brightness, saturation, contrast and hue from the main video adjustment page.
It also has enhanced functionality for backlight compensation, auto white balance, auto gain control and flickerless for different application conditions. These however are controlled through physical dip-switches on the camera rather than from the software.
Audio
The camera supports 1-way audio which means that you can listen in to the area the camera is installed.
Events
The camera supports the sending of images to an email account or FTP server based on motion detection, non-motion or external trigger. The options are very limited when setting up events and in the time we spent with the camera we could not get it to send images via email or FTP which was a concern.
Quality
We found the frame-rate of the camera to be exceptional, delivering a full 25fps over our LAN. This of course would be limited by bandwidth when viewed if the Internet.
However, we found it very difficult to obtain a reasonable, sharp image from the camera. We were using a very good lens and found the result to be poor enough not to be able to capture likenesses. There was also a lot of bad colouration in the image which we could not resolve using the image settings.
Maybe if we had more time with the camera we could obtain a better result but ultimately we were not happy with the image quality we gained during the camera’s testing.
Conclusion
The camera is limited by offering only MPEG-4 video through Active-X. It’s also limited by the quality of the image it produces. We tried for a long time to get a decent image from the camera using a high quality lens but we were never able to get an image we were happy with.
By having to plug the camera into their local network via the WAN port, customers/end users will always question which port to use and this will lead to unwanted confusion for them. If they plug the camera into the LAN port then they won’t be able to achieve external access.
Image upload via email or FTP didn’t work for us after spending 30 minutes to an hour configuring it. That is a worry. If we can’t get this to work how will any of our customers?
It’s hard to estimate how many of our customers use UPnP. This networking architecture helps configure customer routers automatically so that their cameras can been accessed externally over the internet. Our thoughts are that most of the time this works for the customer so if they were supplied with a camera which had no UPnP support then this would again generate even more dissatifaction and confusion.
We find it hard to place who this camera is marketed to. We feel if we were to use this camera it would have to be in a professional capacity as the camera is not targeted at general end users, but the image quality contradicts that. In the end we feel that the camera doesn’t offer anything new to the space which can’t be achieved or done better by another brand.