What our experts say…
Normally we expect big and heavy digital video recorders to be mostly full of air, maybe a hard drive or two and a couple of small circuit boards but usually much of the weight is down to a lot of heavy-gauge ironmongery. Our Panasonic WJ-RT416 weighed in at a tad over 12kg so it is up there amongst the all-time heavyweights of digital video recording, but this one is different.
It does have a very substantial case and chassis, capable of containing no less than six hard drives (or five HDDs and one DVD writer), but there’s a lot of circuitry inside the box as well. We counted six PCBs. There may well be more lurking in amongst the maze of wiring, and with so much going on it’s bound to get a bit warm, which explains the five cooling fans dotted around the box.
The really odd thing, though, is why there is so much going on inside the box when other manufacturers fit very similar, and in some cases even more sophisticated, designs into smaller spaces and seem to manage with fewer circuit boards. The answer must lie in the quality of construction, which in parts is reminiscent of military-grade hardware, virtually bullet-proof and designed to withstand battlefield conditions, though sticky labels on the case and warning notices dotted around the instruction manual caution end-users to treat it gently, for fear of damaging its delicate hard drives…
For such a big machine it is quite sparsely appointed once you get past the basics. These include 16 channel inputs each capable of recording at up to 25 images per second, with a maximum resolution of 704 x 288 pixels. It uses MPEG-4 compression with four quality settings. Various storage configurations are available. Our test sample came with a single 250Gb drive, and this can be expanded up to a total of 1.5 terabytes (eventually extendible up to 3Tb, according to the brochure). There’s also provision for a DVD writer drive. Recordings can also be exported to external drives through a pair of USB ports, and there’s provision to configure the DVR and monitor live and recorded images via a network connection.
It has a motion detector for each channel with associated alarm inputs and outputs plus optional network notification for alarm events. One unusual and welcome feature is 16-channel audio recording. It also supports a number of communications protocols for PTZ cameras when used with a compatible controller, but we’re close to the bottom of the barrel now and most of what remain are the sort of standard features you’ll find on any DVR.
At this point it’s also worth mentioning a couple of notable omissions, like the facility to assign a title or ident to the camera channels – you are stuck with the default ‘Cam 1’, ‘Cam 2’ etc. designations. There are no picture controls either and playback options are strangely convoluted and difficult to use, as is Search and it is in need of better on-screen indications of what’s going on.
The tiny mode and status icons that appear at the bottom of the screen are difficult to decipher and, on occasions, see, especially if they’re displayed against a bright area of the image or there is a lot of activity on the screen.
With a case depth of 460mm, size will almost certainly be a consideration on some installations, and it is worth making sure that the front end of the unit is easy to get at if there are any plans to add extra hard drives at a later date. These are fitted by removing the front panel, which ironically, once detached, makes it a great deal easier to use. But before we get down to details, it’s time for a quick tour of the front and rear.
On the far left of the front panel there’s a vertical column of mode and status indicators and to the right of that is a curved row of winking LEDs showing how many HDDs are installed. Apart from the strange design of this part of the panel, the whole thing seems a bit pointless as it doesn’t really tell the user anything, other than the number of connected drives. The next feature of note is a vertical row of three display mode buttons. To the right of that is a bank of 16 illuminated camera selection buttons. These double up as a numeric keypad, for data entry (time and date, timer settings and so on), which explains the appearance of a ‘0’ digit label on the channel 10 button. In the centre is a four-way cursor control and this is surrounded by a mixture of function buttons. On the far right are some VCR-like ‘transport’ keys, a USB socket, hidden behind a small hinged flap, and below that a blanked out panel that would be used for the optional DVD writer drive.
On the back panel there’s a bank of BNC sockets for camera inputs and loop-throughs and the single video monitor output; a second monitor output is provided though this has a VGA output for a PC monitor. Two RS485 data ports are used for connection to an RS485 camera or compatible data device and next to that is a standard Ethernet socket for the network connection. A second USB port is in the middle and to the right of that are two 25-pin D-Sup sockets for audio inputs and alarm inputs and outputs. Audio inputs for channels 1 to 6 are handled by a bank of six phono sockets (7 – 16 are on the uppermost of the two 25-pin D-Subs). Finally, on the far right there’s a press-button on/off switch and a socket for the mains cable.
Setup and operation
Pressing the Setup button opens a Pin protected menu screen with eight options. System Setup covers time and date setting, language, login options, error buzzer; a separate sub menu covers time and date display formats, auto adjust, summer time and automatic data deletion. Menu item number two is Recording Setup, this is split into three sections (Common Setup, Manual Recording Setup & Timer Recording Setup), covering things like enabling power on and record, overwrite mode, audio enable, file length (05 – 60 minutes), I frame insertion interval (1 – 4 seconds) and a global resolution setting (Field 704 x 288 or SIF 352 x 288). Under Manual Recording Setup there are presets for setting the recording quality for each camera (SP Fine, Fine, Normal & Extended).,
Menu number three is Event Setup for configuring alarm buzzer, pre-alarm recording time, alarm recording quality and the motion detector. This proved to be unexpectedly difficult to use, due to the colour coded targets (clear for off, green for active, blue for activated), which sounds fairly straightforward but in practice it can be awkward to see when targets are active or not.
The fourth menu, for display settings, has switches for enabling or disabling various items of information that appear on the screen, setting the sequence dwell and assigning cameras to the various display layouts (four quads, two 5+1 and one 3 x 3). The Camera Control menu, which is number five on the list is used to select control protocols for PTZ cameras, cable type and cable length compensation. Communication Setup is menu item six and it is used to configure the network connection and RS485 comms.
We’re on the home stretch with menu seven, User Management. This has settings for controlling access to each camera channel and creating Manager, Operator and Viewer passwords. Finally, the Maintenance menu has sub menus for accessing alarm and error logs, displaying system information and recording status, disk management, display current online users, reset to factory defaults, reboot system and advanced system info, which includes operation and access logs and firmware upgrade.
Operationally, the first thing to say about the RT416 is how awkward it is to use. The menus are difficult to navigate and often counter intuitive. For example, the four-way cursor control looks as though it has a centre ‘Enter’ button, but this is just decorative, instead you have to remember which, of a wide selection of buttons, you need to press to carry out a particular action, or change a setting.
In routine day-to-day use, searching through a long recording to find a particular sequence can be a nightmare. The playback controls sometimes seem frozen, changing speed or direction can take an agonisingly long time. They’re like unresponsive lift call buttons and you find yourself stabbing at the buttons to spur them into action only to find that it was still thinking about the first command and you have inadvertently changed to another playback mode.
Things improve slightly with network operation, though this can be a test of endurance to set up, as the supplied software has to be configured manually, and some familiarity with the ways of PC networks, and Windows XP will definitely come in handy. Incidentally, the client software is XP only, so bear that in mind if the RT416 is going to be used on anything other than a Windows based network.
Performance
The slightly rocky ride we’ve had so far with the RT416 is mitigated by better than average picture quality and the MPEG 4 processing is amongst the cleanest we’ve seen, producing crisp, detailed images on the higher quality settings at all replay speeds. Even the lower settings gave a good account of themselves, though the maximum recording times are shorter than you might expect.
For example, a system with 500Gb of storage, recording all 16 channels at the highest quality setting for 10 hours a day, would start overwriting data after just 3 days, and this is without any overheads imposed by audio recording. Changing to the lowest quality setting would add only another 3.5 days to the total.
