Axis Touts Faster, Smaller Products at ISC West

• By Brent Dirks
• Mar 28, 2012

Axis Communications touted faster and smaller with the introduction of a slate of new products at a press breakfast to start ISC West Wednesday in Las Vegas.

While the IP market for video surveillance continues to grow at a consistent rate, more than 70 percent of the market is still analog. While larger deployments skew more toward the IP side with a better total cost of ownership, small installations of 16 cameras or less are still heavily analog.

But Axis is looking to change that with the introduction of its AXIS Camera Companion system. The system does away with the familiar encoder and DVR and focuses on storage at the edge with SD cards, making each camera an independent, smart recording device.

With 32GB of SD storage, the system can record at least two weeks of HD video. And that should be more than enough for the small systems that Axis is targeting.

To show how easy the Camera Companion is to deploy, the Axis team asked everyone at the breakfast to help setup a system.

After inserting an SD card into an Axis camera, all it took to finish the setup was a quick guided setup on a computer. And if a room full of journalists can set up the system, it should be a snap for anyone in the field as well.

"Edge storage is the future," said Fredrik Nilsson, general manager for Axis Communications.

Nilsson also said that a four-camera system using the technology can cost less than $1,000, which should help eliminate the cost issue of IP technology.

And while the megapixel race used to dominate IP camera industry, Axis showed how Moore's Law is adding up to improvements in other areas of the camera. With the company's ARTPEC-4 system on a chip , technology advancements has allowed better image quality, more efficient H.264 compression, more processing power for intelligent video applications and enhanced CPU performance.

The company also introduced indoor and outdoor IP cameras with built-in IR technology, which is a first from Axis. The IR technology is based on high-efficiency LEDs sunk behind the camera lens to lessen the impact of heat while providing up to 50 feet of IR coverage.

Running 24 hours a day, the IR illuminators can provide more than 7 years of IR light.