HOWTO – Avoid infrared reflections in your Y-cam Shell
The Y-cam Shell is a great way to mount your Y-cam White, Y-cam Black and Y-cam Knight camera outdoors. It is designed for ease-of-use and work with the wireless capabilities of the Y-cam range.
We are asked regularly why the cameras’ internal LEDs (Black and Knight) reflect back from the Y-cam Shell’s internal dome. There is a very simple solution to this.
Each Y-cam Shell comes with two manuals – one for the Y-Cam White and one for the Y-Cam Black and Y-Cam Knight. The difference between these cameras is night view capability through built-in infrared LEDs. When installing your camera into the Y-cam Shell ensure you follow the instructions from the appropriate manual.
The only other difference during installation is that for the Y-Cam Black and Y-Cam Knight you must remove the Shell’s internal dome before installing the camera. The dome on both the Black and the Knight cameras is capable of external installation and when mounted in the Shell this is what projects from the front of the housing.
Y-Cam Shell with internal dome in place.
Y-Cam Shell with internal dome removed for installation of Y-Cam Black or Knight.
If you install your Y-Cam Black or Knight into the Shell with the internal dome still attached the infrared LEDs on the camera will reflect on the internal dome and ruin your night-time images.
We think the Y-Cam Shell manual isn’t particularly clear on this point and many people miss this key step in the installation process.
Glossary Term: P-Iris
P-iris is an automatic iris control system developed by Axis Communications, designed to give precise control over the iris opening using a stepper-motor driven iris and specialized software. The P-iris system has been developed to make improvements over the traditional auto-iris by giving better control over the aperture.
In bright conditions an auto-iris lens may be subject to blurring caused by diffraction. This is when the surrounding light levels cause the iris to close too much. This is even more noticable in megapixel cameras where the pixel size in the image sensor is a lot smaller than conventional standard definition cameras.
This has led to Axis developing an iris system where the user has greater control over the aperture and by doing so has provided greater image quality with higher contrast, increased clarity, higher resolution and better depth of field control.
P-iris is expected to replace the DC-iris as the standard method of iris control in fixed Axis network cameras.
Image on left shows traditional lens, image on right shows the new P-iris lens demonstrating better depth of field control
HOWTO: Automatically create video clips using motion detection in a Y-cam IP camera
Taking what we have learned from HOWTO: Create video clips on demand for local hard disk storage using the Y-cam IP camera we can take it a step further.
How about instead of manually creating video clips each time we have the camera create them automatically when it detects motion? Sounds like that kind of thing would be useful eh? Well it’s very simple to set up so let’s take a look at how it is done.
This guide is suitable for the following Y-cam models:
Evaluation: Pelco Spectra IV IP Dome Series
Pelco are a leading manufacturer of video security systems and equipment. They have long been established as an expert in their field and produce professional CCTV cameras, access control, video matrix systems, DVR recording solutions and hold many respected product lines such as Spectra, Camclosure, Endura and Digital Sentry.
Pelco are now taking their years of experience and applying it to the IP video industry with the introduction of the Spectra IV dome series.
They’ve kindly sent us a demo unit for evaluation. Let’s take a look…
HOWTO: Create video clips on demand for local hard disk storage using the Y-cam IP camera
One of the interesting features of the Y-cam home security camera is its ability to record short video clips with audio. These video files are stored natively in .asf format, suitable for playing back using Microsoft Windows Media Player.
This guide will show you how to create video files on demand by manually selecting the video start and stop points from the camera’s live view interface. We will also show you how to choose the location for storage of your video clips and also how you can limit the maximum file size per video.
This guide is suitable for the following Y-cam models:
HOWTO Set up a personal FTP server for use with an IP camera’s image transfer function
With the image transfer feature found in many IP cameras you can store a number of images in a central location as an archive for security purposes or maybe for building a time-lapse movie.
These images are sent using the FTP protocol which stands for File Transfer Protocol and is normally associated with transferring files across the Internet. It also works equally as well on a local network and this guide will show you how to set it up.