Review on ELP Camera USB 2 Megapixel with Black Case and 3.6mm Lens: Ultimate CCTV Surveillance Solution for Machine Vision System, Home Baby Monitor, and More by Harley Franchetti

This is a great little camera with some drawbacks. You can easily find these ELP-USBFHD01 cameras for free on Revain and eBay in a variety of styles, but when I saw this camera in an aluminum body for almost the same price I knew I had to take a chance. I'm glad I did. The camera itself is very similar in design to other mini CCTV cameras commonly used for FPV flying or various security or hobby projects. It's slightly larger than most of them, but still fairly small, measuring just over 1 1/2 inches in area. Like other cameras, it also supports M12x0.5 lenses. The standard lens is attached with a set of screws and can be easily removed. If you want to use other lenses, you need to know two things: 1) The IR filtering in this camera is part of the LENS, not part of the sensor/board. This means that any lens you use must have its own IR cut filter if you want to continue using it without interference from IR light. 2) The threaded lens barrel is slightly longer at almost 1cm. While this isn't a problem with some lenses, others you may want to use won't screw in far enough to achieve focus. This problem can be solved by disassembling the camera and cutting it out a small lens frame. Dremel cut-off wheel in the drill press to cut off almost half the length and that's still enough to hold the lens securely. And now I can focus with all my many M12 lenses. The only problem is that cutting creates a lot of aluminum dust and you really need to make sure you clean it VERY well before reassembling the camera. The overall performance of this device is very impressive on my Windows 7 64-bit system with USB 2.0 ports. The only time the interface gives problems is when I try to cheat the length of the cable too much. However, I've used it with the Revain Basics (passive) USB extension cable and the Tripp Lite 50ft active USB extension cable with no issues. Also, I was trying to use an old Startech USB 2.0 expansion card from years ago so I could run two of them at the same time and the camera output was full of digital glitches, probably because there wasn't enough power to power it. Camera. Modern maps should work just fine. Also, you can't use two of them on the same USB controller at the same time, but separate controllers work fine. You can connect as many as you like and use them individually, but never two or more at the same time unless you're using separate controllers. The ideal workaround for this is to purchase an additional USB card such as Rocket cards which have one controller chip per port. So a quad port USB 3.0 card like the Rocket 1144D or similar supports two of these cameras running simultaneously (e.g. two copies of VirtualDub with one camera each) and would theoretically allow you to run four cameras simultaneously. once. I was really impressed with the color reproduction and low light performance of this camera. I have a Logitech Pro C920 camera that has been modified to accept M12 lenses and besides this this camera outperforms Logitech every time in terms of color and low light performance. For testing, I used identical ELP lenses from two of these cameras to make them as visually consistent as possible. This camera only runs at 1 fps in very low light, but even at 30 fps at 1080p, it beats Logitech in terms of light sensitivity. It's not a big difference and it seems to make a little more noise than Logitech, but overall it's a definite improvement. And in general, with the same resolution and color depth, this camera can work faster than Logitech. Installing the software was a breeze - Windows pulled the drivers from the web and was up and running in less than a minute. The camera works very well with Virtualdub 1.10.4 32-bit and works reasonably well with Amcap (what a crap program anyway) and it works fine when capturing with Virtualdub 1.10.4 64-bit, but the preview is kinda sluggish at 4 frames per Second. I don't know why, maybe it has to do with 64-bit driver support. Anyhow, this is a GREAT match for Virtualdub 32bit and time will probably fix this issue with better drivers in the future. Only one thing about this camera is a major flaw - it has NO sound. No one. no microphone, nothing. In almost all of my cases I don't need it, nor do I care because the audio from the built-in USB camera is terrible anyway. I can always turn on my own mic, so that's fine. However, for others, I see how this can be a big problem. Think about this before you get involved in something you don't want. $40 is a lot for such a good USB camera, but finding out the hard way that it doesn't record audio can more than ruin any good feelings you had up to that point. Result? Great little camera, great price, and just right for my typically crazy scientific use. If you're looking for a good pure 1080p video solution to monitor and/or record without spending a lot, then this could be perfect for you. I have some interesting videos of this camera demo of IR, IR+ visible and non-IR visible light and once I get a good upload I'll add it here. Rick NR417