Review on PTZOptics 30X NDI Network Broadcast Camera by Tony Doolittle

This product was purchased as a quick replacement for a homemade (3D printed) worship machine. We have a finely tuned setup, using mostly open source software on a Linux streaming machine, and were looking for a product that fits into a relatively small budget, uses existing hardware, and is quick to install. Not only were all of these criteria met, our expectations were exceeded. We ended up using HDMI for low latency, and quickly created our own software using simple camera-assisted HTTP calls (which has surprisingly good documentation, btw). The complete installation took only 20 minutes: mark, drill, assemble and connect. My favorite feature is the Ethernet support, which means there are only two cables attached to this thing. So we fired it up and ran it, and the fine-tuning of the image quality was amazing. The hardest part of the setup was probably reassigning its IP address. I personally think it would make a lot more sense to have a default DHCP option in the firmware, but instead set a static address on the /16 subnet, while most networks have /24. However, they had a useful utility for doing this to do on their website, which was fairly easy to find by scrolling through the instruction manual. Another review here mentions irrelevant data in the manual. Chances are you don't need half of it; This camera is designed to be scaled from amateur to professional settings and as such serves as a platform for developers to take advantage of the wide range of features it offers. If you don't need all that, no problem - this camera will still work for all your purposes. As for customer service, I can't comment on that. I didn't need to talk to them. In short, PTZ Optic's 30x NDI is insanely versatile, has superb image quality and is absolutely unmatched by competing hardware.