Bosch DINION 7100i IR First Impressions Excellent.

Bosch DINION 7100i IR First Impressions – Bosch Dinion 7100i IR NBE-7703-ALX bullet camera is a solid unit, weighing in at around 3kg and rated IP66/67 against water and dust ingress and IK10 against impact. This 7100i also meets the IP6K9K rating, which means it’s impervious dust, high temperatures and high pressure jets of water.

There’s a 1/1.8th-inch 4MP sensor supported by a 4.7-10mm motorised zoom lens, giving an angle of view from 103-53 degrees, the operating temperature is -50 to 60C, and there’s electronic image stabilisation. Meanwhile Bosch IVA Pro delivers deep learning-based detection of people and vehicles to scenes ranging from sterile zones to crowded and congested streets.

Bosch DINION 7100i IR First Impressions Excellent

The DINION 7100i IR is a night owl with an 80-metre 850nm IR range, as well as optional invisible 940nm IR and white light. The Bosch 7100i IR features Bosch’s Starlight X technology for enhanced low-light performance, as well as Bosch’s HDR X (high dynamic range), which delivers strong numbers of 141dB.

There’s a serious specification list but I’m going to avoid delving into it too deeply and stick with first impressions. Build quality is epic – the weight of this camera is up there at the heavier end of what the Magic Arm is happy carrying.

Getting the camera locked and loaded on the local network is relatively simple – in this case it’s arriving via a Ubiquiti Unifi 16-port Gigabit PoE switch and I’m running it on my own workstation, which is a custom-built ASUS gaming machine.

There’s a heap of functionality in the Bosch camera browser and I get in and do a bit of tweaking, including upping sharpness, setting the camera to fast movement, activating WDR, activating image stabilization and checking the camera LED array is activated.

Looking at the camera full wide on setup it seems a bit soft, so I hop into the lens wizard and roll in a touch – the zoom and focus functions are pleasingly quick and the camera finds its focus, giving me a clearer look at performance. The usable pixels are 2688 x 1520 – around 4MP – which is not super high resolution but offers a good balance with the 1/1.8th inch sensor size.

The Bosch 7100i IR delivers an image that is low contrast, very uniform in terms of colour and with excellent light balance across the frame. This latter quality it continues to deliver as the afternoon wears on, which is good performance in our challenging application.

The focal range of the camera is 4.7-10mm and I find myself happy at around 6.5mm – a slightly longer focal length than usual, that contrives to give me excellent depth of field. My interest in depth of field is all about Bosch’s latest IVA Pro suite, which delivers deep learning-based detection of people and vehicles.

Bosch DINION 7100i IR First Impressions Excellent

The marketing blurb claims IVA Pro can handle anything from sterile zones to crowded and congested streets. And it can – I am getting delineations of people and vehicles in my scene to about 40 metres after which point they occupy a pixel count that’s under the IVA Pro’s threshold of consideration.

Regardless, this version of IVA Pro is a step up on Bosch’s already capable analytics package and I’m seriously interested in how capable it’s going to be in failing light. Something I notice is that IVA Pro is detecting people moving at distance behind vehicles when I have not noticed them – nice performance for security operators wrangling complex live scenes.

As the light starts to go, I find performance stays consistent – best of all faces and plates stay consistent. I’m rolled in a little on zoom bear in mind, but I’m holding fast moving plates when I should have lost them already.

The image below was taken at around 7pm between 11-storey buildings and it’s excellent – strong performance in colour with around 10 lux at the lens. In the distance – though not in this image – I have an admissable face, and I nearly have the plate at 30ips. Am I looking forward to an all-night test with the Dinion 7000i IR bullet camera? You bet I am.

Stand by for SEN’s full review of the Bosch DINION 7100 IR bullet camera – you can read the spec sheet here, or read more SEN news here.

Bosch DINION 7100i IR Features

• 4.1MP Sensor Delivering 2688 x 1520 pixels
• Motorised Lens – 4.7-10mm
• Ratings – IP66/67 IK10
• Frame rate – 1-60 fps (I’m using 30)
• Horizontal field of view – 103–53 degrees
• Electronic image stablisation
• IP rating – IP66, IP67, IP6K9K
• Starlight X low light technology
• WDR technology – HDR X
• Operating temperature -50 to 60C
• Sensor type – 1/1.8 inch CMOS
• Video compression – H.264, H.265, MJPEG.

“Bosch DINION 7100i IR First Impressions Excellent.”