Testing Arecont Vision's AV3105 H.264 Camera

Arecont Vision's H.264 megapixel product line has drawn an immense amount of interest. At the beginning of 2008, Arecont was the first surveillance company to announce H.264 multi-megapixel and is currently the only manufacturer offering H.264 megapixel up to 5MP.

At the same time, a lot of questions have been raised about image quality, CPU utilization and actual bandwidth savings.

In this test of the AV3105DN with the MPL4-10 lens, we explore the performance and benefits of Arecont's H.264 offering.

Key findings include:

• Image quality was sharp with basic manual focusing of the lens
• Compared to MJPEG, H.264 CPU usage was consistently lower
• Bandwidth utilization for H.264 streams was up to 90% lower than MJPEG
• High motion or low lux levels caused H.264 bandwidth utilization to rise significantly, reducing efficiency gains
• Numerous problems existed using the Arecont Vision VMS software though 3rd party VMS software worked well