POC Technology

In this post we are going to look at the new POC technology that is available on the SPRO range, what it can do and usage situations. Firstly, what is POC technology? POC stands for Power Over Co-ax, which from the name allows you to put power down the coax cable. It sounds simple enough but this has plenty of benefits, you could power a POC enabled camera with just the one cable. It sounds similar to an IP CCTV system, whereby one Ethernet cable would power a camera and transfer the video signal too, but the costs are a lot lower. An SPRO 4MP IP CAMERA will cost around £110 on this site, but an SPRO 4MP POC CAMERA will only cost just over £65. That’s approximately a £45 per camera, and given most systems will use between 4 and 8 cameras, that’s a potential saving of £180 - £360 just on the cameras themselves.

So we have easier cable running and a lower cost per camera but what other benefits are there? As it’s a new technology there are still new features being designed and added to the range. The recorders themselves are able to handle 4K pictures from cameras and they can handle alarm signals and audio over the single cable too. In fact, you can find SPRO’s new PIR cameras here and also cameras with built-in microphones here too.

…And the drawbacks? There are two significant points about these systems that we feel needs to be mentioned. You may have seen a post that we made before about the different protocols being used and that most cameras now are 4-in-1 so that they can be used in different machines. The current SPro POC range is only available in the CVI protocol, this isn’t a major issue though as most people would normally purchase the same brand recorders and cameras together. The second most significant point is that it is new technology; most companies have failed to adopt this technology so the range out there is still relatively small. As such there won’t be as much support on the various forums on this technology. We have a team of highly skilled technicians who are always willing to help.

Does this mean we should be investing in POC cameras and recorders? Well POC is still a subset of HD Analogue recorders, meaning that the argument will still exist on whether we should be purchasing HD Analogue or IP CCTV systems. If it was a choice of standard HD Analogue and POC then there would not be any drawbacks in purchasing a POC unit, afterall, a POC system does not have to use a POC camera but a POC camera will still need a POC recorder.