Siselectron Technology is a new player in the IP video security market, with a limited but impressive range of IP cameras designed for demanding applications.

Features

The SCI1132 is a box-type camera that is suitable for indoor usage, with some impressive features that you won’t easily find elsewhere. To start with, it has a built-in 3x zoom lens (3-9mm), which provides a very useful zoom range, from wide-angled to moderately telephoto. It has an impressive 4 MP resolution (twice the number of pixels as 1080p), and it can stream at its full resolution at up to 30fps. In addition, it has auto-focus (rather than the fixed-focus lenses found on lower-quality cameras) as well as an audio input (to be used with an external powered microphone), and power-over-ethernet.

 

Build Quality

The camera body is part-metal and part-plastic and solidly built. It’s quite large, measuring around 170mm (6.7″) in length and 80mm (3″) in width, so the camera is more suitable for office/commercial environments rather than home usage, where you would want a more compact camera body.

 

Setup

This camera come pre-set to the static IP address 192.168.0.250, which means that initially you may have to temporarily change your Mac’s IP settings in order to connect (as per our Setting up network cameras instructions). However, once the camera’s IP address is correctly configured for your network, the web interface works well on Mac web browsers and has all the features that most users will need (image adjustment, flip/rotation, text overlay, time server synchronisation and much more).

One other quirk is that the default username is “Admin”, as opposed to the more usual “admin”; the default password is 1234.

To use this camera in SecuritySpy, use the ONVIF profile, which works perfectly to obtain the full-resolution H.264 stream.

Image Quality

In good lighting conditions the image quality is very good, and the high-quality lens and 4 MP resolution ensures that there is plenty of detail captured by the camera.

Low-light colour performance is acceptable but not outstanding, with significant noise in the video image in low lighting conditions. As the light levels decrease the camera does automatically switch to black/white mode, which lowers the noise levels somewhat.

To some extent, high-resolution cameras inevitably suffer from poor low-light performance, as the amount of light falling on each pixel of the image sensor decreases as the resolution increases. This camera doesn’t perform especially badly in low light, in comparison to other cameras of similar resolutions.

The pre-set H.264 encoding bit rates are on the low side, resulting in noticeable compression artefacts when there is significant motion in the video feed, however this is easily fixed by increasing the rates via the camera’s settings pages. Instead, it would be better if the camera were to support VBR (Variable Bit Rate) encoding, as this would allow its encoder to automatically adjust the bit rate up or down depending on the complexity of the video image.

There is significant barrel distortion, giving a mild fish-eye effect, but this is fairly typical of wide-angled lenses. As the lens zooms in, this effect becomes much less pronounced.

Summary

This is an perfect camera to use in commercial environments with good lighting. The high resolution and impressive feature set will be a an asset to any professional video surveillance system. Unfortunately the camera is not yet available to purchase in the UK and USA, however this should change in the near future.

Pros:

• High resolution and high-quality lens gives good image quality
• Well-implemented web interface that works well with Mac browsers
• Good feature set with audio and zoom.

Cons:

• Average low-light performance
• Pre-set static IP address can make setup a bit tricky.

Note: SecuritySpy is our Mac NVR software product, which will enable you to easily set up an effective video surveillance system in your home or office. It works with thousands of cameras, so there is always one to suit your requirements. Please feel free to email us with any questions.