What our experts say …
If you half close your eyes, the Sanyo DSR-2016 digital video recorder looks a bit like a piece of hi-fi kit from the 1980s; we certainly don’t hold that against it, and it says more about our age and idiosyncrasies than anything else, but there is definitely a retro theme to be explored here and it extends to other areas, where it can make life a tad difficult, as we shall see.
But first let’s see what it can do. The key features are 16 camera channels and four audio channels; it’s a full triplex design allowing simultaneous recording, playback and monitoring over a computer network. Video data is recorded using the ever-popular MPEG-4 format; the baseline model has a 160Gb HDD, our review sample was fitted with two 320Gb drives, and it supports up to a terabyte of storage. JPEG stills and AVI video can be exported using the built-in CD-RW drive or to a USB storage device.
Recording rates of up to 240ips are possible, with individual camera recording rates adjustable between one and 30ips at resolutions of up to 720 x 480. It has 16 external alarm sensor inputs and on-board motion detection triggered alarm recording. Live image display, recording replay, set-up options, two-way audio and email notification are all possible over a LAN or WAN connection.
There’s also an option for PTZ control using RS-485 multi-protocol telemetry, and it comes with an IR remote handset that covers most functions. Behind the scenes the 2016 appears to be running a variant of the Linux operating system, which bodes well for reliability and stability.
On the front panel, from left to right, we have the power on button and a USB port. Next to that a hinged flap covers the CD-RW drive. On the left side there’s three rows of buttons for camera selection, ‘transport’, display and search functions, and on the far right, the menu button and a cluster of keys for controlling menu selections and playback speeds. A row of LED indicators along the top edge shows status and the camera channels being recorded. The rear panel sports a bank of 32 BNC sockets for the camera inputs and loop-throughs.
Below that there are three video monitor output sockets (two BNC and one S-Video) plus five phono sockets for the four audio inputs and one output channel.
Two banks of spring contacts handle external alarm inputs and outputs, a 15-pin D-Sub connector is used for VGA video monitor output. Next to that is the Ethernet LAN socket, a nine-pin D-Sub RS-232 for maintenance and diagnostic connections, a four-way spring terminal for RS422/485 comms and a DIP-switch for setting RS485 termination, VGA monitor output and PAL/NTSC operation. Finally on the far right there’s the power switch socket and a cooling fan vent.
With the lid removed it’s apparent no expense has been spared in the materials and quality of construction. The heavily over-engineered metal chassis supports the hard drives on a rail and beneath that is a single PCB. Apart from the CD-RW drive and a few ribbon cables there’s not a lot to see.
The only noteworthy point is the use of older IDE type drives. It’s not necessarily a problem, just a little surprising in view of the fact that pretty well all PC-based devices and DVRs these days use the faster SATA type drives. Long term they should also be more reliable, due to the use of simpler cabling, which also makes it easier from a servicing point of view. Another retro feature perhaps?
Setup and operation
The 2016 gets off to a promising start, and after it has finished booting up it is ready to run, recording all connected video and audio channels at conservative default settings. To set up the unit press the menu button, and when asked enter the four-digit PIN code, using the camera selector buttons on the front or remote control.
The main menu opens with the selected camera channel still displayed. This is not good, and it makes the on-screen menu quite difficult to read, especially if the scene is brightly lit, contains strong colours or a lot of movement. It would have been better to reduce the brightness/reduce the contrast or replace the camera image with a neutral background. Our solution was to switch to an unconnected channel – though this isn’t always possible – whenever there was a need to access the menus.
The main menu comprises six large icons labelled Live, Record, System, Network, HDD Set and Service. The Live menu includes switches for setting display sequence and dwell time, enabling the bleeper for alarm or motion triggered events, setting/changing camera IDs, brightness, contrast and saturation and setting the alarm input and output options.
Frame rate and Quality settings (five levels) are on the Record menu, along with recording mode (continuous, motion, alarm, schedule). This menu also contains the setup for the motion detection system (full screen or partial zone, 30 x 24 targets), alarm recording setup, pre and post alarm recording times, audio (on/off) and Timer on/off.
The System menu covers system information, loading default settings, setting and changing admin, user and network passwords, setting time and date, RS485 and PTZ configuration, OSD language and remote control ID setting.
On the Network menu there are switches for enabling client access (up to four PC users can connect to the unit at a time), a switch for Bandwidth Saving sets a limit on bandwidth for networks that have restrictions on the amount of data they can handle, there are also settings for network type (LAN, ADSL or DHCP) and where appropriate, fields for inputting an IP address, subnet mask, gateway and DNS server addresses, plus switches for DDNS and enabling email notification.
Setting overwrite mode (when the storage devices are full) drive formatting and auto deletion settings are on the HDD Set menu and last but not least, the Service menu covers saving and loading configuration data to a USB drive and displaying disk information (size, remaining capacity, date and time of first and most recent use).
Apart from the difficulty of reading menus against an image, everything is reasonably intuitive. The Search facilities are easy to use (providing you can read the menus…). Recordings can be located by various criteria: Event, Timeline, Time/Date, First/Last, Log or Bookmark, and then scanned using a responsive forward and reverse search (up to x8 normal speed), and pause/frame-step. More information about this would be welcome, particularly the impact changing frame rates and quality settings have on recording times. There is a vague bar graph showing disk usage, but without knowing how much actual time remains potentially important data can be overwritten. We also have some concerns over protecting recordings.
There is a Bookmarking facility, for tagging recordings that are deemed important, but it doesn’t appear that they will necessarily be protected, unless the Overwrite mode is disabled.
The other fly in the ointment is Network operation. Perhaps we have been spoiled recently with network devices that require little or no assistance to set up, but the 2016 is an unwelcome reminder of how it used to be in the bad old days with manual configuration.
In order for the network viewer software to communicate with the DVR over a LAN the local port, IP address and subnet mask all have to be set but the instructions rather gloss over this tedious and, for us, rather frustrating procedure. For reasons that are still not clear the unit stubbornly refused to connect to the LAN and resisted all attempts to set up a connection on two separate small office networks. In fact for much of the time it remained invisible to ‘pings’ and network diagnostic probing. However, after many configuration changes, various cable swaps, numerous reboots, much messing around with firewalls and a lot of swearing, it suddenly started working…
Once the connection is been established it works well enough but our setup proved to be somewhat unreliable. It is possible its difficulties may have been compounded by issues with the configuration of the networks it was tested on, but these were real world set-ups and it seems more likely that it is was as result of some old-time networking hardware and software inside the machine.
The supplied client program is only listed as supporting Windows XP, which suggests it may be in need of an overhaul as well if it is to stand up in a market that is increasingly populated by Linux, Mac OSX and now Windows Vista hardware.
Performance
MPEG recording quality can be quite variable, depending on the codecs used and how much quality the manufacturer is willing to sacrifice to recording times. Sanyo has struck a good balance, though, and at the highest frame rates and quality settings there’s plenty of fine detail, colours are bright and natural looking, motion is fluid, and noise levels and recording artefacts – at all replay speeds – are negligible. At lower quality settings there are noticeable reductions in resolution and small increases in motion artefacts, but these are acceptable tradeoffs and even on the lowest settings recorded images are still useable.
Exported still JPEG and AVI video images on CD or flash memory show little or no loss of quality though useful on-screen data, such as camera title, time and date doesn’t appear; if there is a way to enable a display, we couldn’t find it.
The machine’s audio recording system is more than adequate for capturing speech and incidental sounds, which often carry valuable evidential information, and having four channels is quite a luxury; however, once again the lack of recording stats means there’s no easy way of telling how much impact audio has on recording times.
What the manufacturer says …
With the recent introduction of the DSR-2016 DVRs, SANYO now has a complete family of digital recording solutions.
Although competitively priced, the DSR-2016, which has 16 channels, can hardly be accused of being light on features. With selectable VGA or composite output, the DSR-2016 records and plays back at up to 200 images per second and the utilisation of MPEG-4 compression ensures that high quality images can be recorded at a low bit-rate – maximising use of the sixteen channel recording capacity.
The DSR-2016 incorporates a CD-R/RW for easy back-up, and with two HDD bays has the capacity for up to 1TB of on board storage.
Network connectivity is on offer over LAN and WAN and with a Dynamic DNS, the DSR-2016 can be accessed with a fixed host name without the requirement of a static IP address.
Other features that make the DSR-2016 stand out from the crowd include four channels of audio recording, full, multi, Quad and sequential display options as well as multiple RS485 telemetry protocols. Installers and users alike will be impressed with the easy setup menu.