Having never heard of the winning camera manufacturer I went over to the ISD stand to see what all the fuss was about. First up I did not see the camera in a test environment so all I got were paper specifications and a feel of the hardware. It’s a comparatively heavy unit in the hand and feels well made.
All the key performance specifications are on the mark, though they are nothing out of the ordinary. You get mini-USB slot, zero-touch installation with selected VMS solutions, a 3-10mm lens, .05 lux minimum scene illumination and an SDXC card slot allowing up to 4TB onboard storage at whichever distant point in the future such titanic flash drives come into existence.
More realistically, the camera is also Trinity and HDWitness server ready, there’s a microphone, PoE and the excellent signal-to-noise ratio of 72.4 dB suggests very strong WDR performance. Compression looks good with H.264 baseline profile, main profile (the default) and high profile Level 5, as well as MPEG. The unit delivers 4 simultaneous video streams. All this is very nice but by no means groundbreaking.
Instead, the stand-out features of the Jaguar, which comes in CS and AF designations, seem to be related to the company’s proprietary suite of edge technologies which somewhat unsurprisingly, ISD calls EDGE technology. According to ISD, this offers ‘DVR-free’ operation and incorporates analytics that ‘report human traffic in real time’.
I did not see how any of this works as the ISD staff were busy the couple of times I visited the stand so I had to make do with poking around the hardware and collecting a brochure. We’re looking forward to doing a full review on the Jaguar in the near future.
-Ed
