Voltek DVC3004 review

Verdict:

Review Date: 21 Feb 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

When we last reviewed CCTV products, Swann's PC DVR 4 NET was our Best Buy.

Since then its price has increased slightly, so we thought we'd compare it with Voltek's similarly priced DVC3004. On installing the two cards, we found they were identical. Both use the same PCI card and the same software, and both cost £99 including VAT.

The PCI card has four BNC video connectors. These will connect directly to most CCTV camera cables, but you might need a phono-to-BNC adaptor for some Swann cameras. The card and software installed without any problems. We were pleased to see that although it ran in a 1,024x768-pixel window, it didn't force us to resize our display resolution to match.

The software can display up to four cameras simultaneously. Its interface isn't the best looking we've seen, but it's easy to access the recorded footage and system settings. You can schedule recordings at a set time or set up motion detection to trigger a recording if someone moves across a certain area. The scheduler works on a weekly basis rather than using specific dates, which should suit most home and small business users.

The software includes a simple network interface, so you can monitor cameras from another PC on the network. This works, but it means installing several unsigned ActiveX components on the viewing PC. To do this, you have to reduce Internet Explorer's security settings significantly. The network interface allows you to monitor live footage or view recorded events.

Viewing recorded footage is easy enough thanks to a timeline interface. Colour coding indicates whether a recording was scheduled, manually activated or triggered by motion detection. It may not be as cheap as it used to be, but this is still a simple and impressive tool that includes all the features you could need.

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