No issues... implemented easily

This PTZ camera has awesome quality in bright and low light. Live streaming church services. The church members are excited to watch the church services on YouTube and Facebook. Tech support (Jenny) is great.

I have had the Avkans 30X NDI PTZ camera for two weeks. I have put it through its paces to see how well it preforms. I used differant control proticols, differant lighting situations with strong to low light. I tested its speed and accuracy with presets. I tested its ability to adjust white balance correctly and it out preformed all other PTZ cameras in the 1080p class that I use at my church. I have been using five PTZ cameras over the past six years and the Avkans PTZ camera works flawlessly. Picture quality with its color and image sharpness puts my other cameras to shame. This PTZ camera is identical to the PTZoptics camera accept for one thing...the price! It uses the same 1/2.7 Panasonic CMOS image sensor as the PTZoptics camera. I will be replacing all of my old PTZ cameras soon with this 30x zoom NDI PTZ camera from Avkans. Its great to be able to connect a single Cat5e or Cat6 cable to this camera for power, control, and video. The NDI compressed video over our network works perfect with our NewTek TriCaster. This camera has a lot of differant ways to connect to other equipment with 3G SDI, HDMI, NDI over IP. I also use a Black Magic ATEM mini extreme ISO in our livestream setup. The Avkans camera simultaneously sends video to both the TriCaster and ATEM with no problems. You can mount this camera on a tripod, wall or ceiling, just flip the image in settings. In the photo the Avkans PTZ 30x NDI camera is on the right. The Avkans camera has no problem adjusting white balance and reproducing color and has a sharper image than the camera on the left. Both cameras are 1080p and have the same size image sensor. This Avkans camera is amazing and I am very impressed with its quality and preformance.

The Camera gives a solid performance. We use RTMP to stream to Facebook or YouTube but we also tested the NDI and had no trouble seeing the stream. Jenny was great at helping me get setup correctly. I would buy this camera again.

We purchased 3 of these for our church, all configured with static IP and they are working flawlessly on NDI!

Like other reviews, Ive been shopping for a PTZ camera to use with OBS to livestream our Churchs Worship services. Weve been using three static USB cameras purchased last spring when lockdowns first went into effect. One of the key features ive been looking for is NDI so we can use existing ethernet wiring and not have to invest in SDI cabling and computer inputs to get signals into OBS. I found that PTZ Optics NDI PTZ cameras seemed to be the gold standard, but couldnt justify the price in our small church. While watching many YouTube videos on PTZ cameras and OBS, i stumbled upon a review for this camera, and after a bit more research decided to pull the trigger on it. As other reviewers have noted, i believe this is a PTZ Optics camera in disguise... probably production overrun thats rebadged, but same camera, and thats a good thing! Image quality is excellent, and the camera operates silently while moving and changing views. Ive only used it connected via POE and NDI, and its great to only have one cable to route and connect for everything. Ive been using the open-source PTZ Optics control plug-in for OBS for controlling the camera from within OBS and it works great! Overall, i am considering this a great find! The only area for improvement for this camera would be that the included manual is lacking in detail and clarity, but since this is effectivley a PTZ Optics camera, there are lots of resources on YouTube and OBS forums for guidance and tutorials. In addition, ive received great support from Jenny at the [email protected] support email. Jenny has responded to my questions quickly each time, including sending me a document with all the HTTPS/CGI-BIN commands that this camera is capable of using for scripting control commands. This command capability gives a whole other level of control possibilities and im excited to learn to use them. If youre on the fence about this camera, just go ahead and order it and you will not be disappointed.

Everything is great

We already had a couple AVKANs cameras and opted to put additional cameras in our auditorium. The new cameras came with NDI built in which is a great upgrade from our original cameras. Now were in the process of obtaining the NDI licenses for our existing cameras so we can use those tools to control.

I bought this camera to use for various outdoor and indoor video shoots for a musical performing group. I was able to (barely) get by with it for the first event, but there were enough video quality problems using it outdoors that Im going to return it. For use in indoor environments, this camera certainly seems usable to me, so I would have no trouble recommending it for someone who wants a basic PTZ camera for a conference room or whatever. In the process of testing this thing out, Ive written large amounts of custom software to throw commands at the device, enabling me to see exactly what does and doesnt work. Im providing this detailed review for anyone who cares about using this for semi-pro live streaming purposes, which tends to have much steeper requirements than, for example, a conference room camera. I hope this detailed review is helpful for folks when deciding whether the cameras limitations are something you can work with, and I hope the manufacturer addresses the firmware limitations Ive encountered in the near future. Indoor video quality: Video quality seems comparable to other cameras on the market, and having a 30x zoom is, of course, great. Its the difference between being able to put a camera at the back of a church and having to put it smack in the middle (though I do wish that the NDI camera manufacturers would include screw threads so you could put teleconverters on them for reach applications). Outdoor video quality: This camera seems to get the exposure badly wrong outdoors when you have a wide contrast ratio (e.g. brightly lit people in the foreground, but shadowed trees in the background), resulting in massively blown highlights. I did not experience this with other NDI cameras (NewTek, Marshall) in the same position, so this should be considered a bug in and of itself. (For that shoot, I was able to swap it with a different camera and put it in a spot where the lighting wasnt so challenging.) Unfortunately, unlike most other cameras on the market, this camera does not provide any web-based control over exposure. This firmware limitation really needs to be fixed ASAP, because unless youre using the camera in a conference room, youll probably eventually run into a situation where you really need exposure compensation. That said, in most indoor environments, it shouldnt be a problem, because the camera *does* have backlight compensation (brightening the highlights further), which is available from the remote and the web UI, IIRC. It is possible to partially work around this limitation with the right external hardware or software. Specifically, this camera supports full manual control over the shutter speed, iris, and gain. You can control that with VISCA-over-IP with the right software. I have not tested the NDI exposure adjustment APIs to see if they work. Its worth noting, however, that neither NewTeks video monitor app nor Siennas similar app supports any exposure control whatsoever, so the answer to that question is mostly academic. The biggest disappointment here was that the camera does *not* appear to support exposure compensation, even over VISCA — only full manual control. (Nothing happens when I send the exposure compensation set command; Ive tested the same code on Marshalls 4K cameras, and it works, so Im reasonably certain that this is an actual firmware limitation.) Unfortunately, the lack of exposure compensation makes it challenging to deal with this camera for what I was planning to use the camera for. Position recall: Like all NDI PTZ cameras, it fully supports storing pan/tilt/zoom locations for near-instant recall. If you have multiple cameras, you may find yourself using this frequently. The motion is fast, so youd never want to have it move on its own while the camera is live, but the feature makes it easy to point the camera at a known location while youre streaming video from a different camera (or other source). PTZ control: Over NDI, pan and tilt work as expected, but zoom control is a single speed (fast). Again, this is a common bug in a lot of these cameras; the same bug exists on cameras by NewTek and Marshall. The workaround is to control the cameras using VISCA-over-IP. VISCA-over-IP behavior: This camera supports two different VISCA-over-IP modes: TCP-based control on port 5678 and UDP-based control on port 52381. That last one was hard to discover; its not the port that PTZOptics uses (1259), and the protocol for UDP on that port requires somewhat different data than the TCP port does, or else weird stuff happens. I ended up finding out about the protocol differences by reading a document from Marshall about their IP cameras (very different hardware, but apparently similar firmware). With this mode, the camera supports... probably eight zoom speeds, though my limited testing so far couldnt confirm that all of the speeds are actually different; there are at least four distinct speeds, and probably eight. In other words, always use VISCA-over-UDP with this camera, at least in the current version of the firmware. Note that this problem is not unique to this camera. Ive seen the same bug with 4K30 cameras from Marshall and 4K60 cameras from NewTek. In other words, Im pretty sure the problems Im having are probably in the NDI SDK itself (or perhaps in their sample code). Besides the zoom speed bugs, theres one other bug I ran into. When a client disconnects suddenly and tries to reconnect, this camera can freeze, requiring you to power-cycle the camera. This bug also exists on older firmware revisions from NewTek (I have not seen this in v.105), and on current firmware from Marshall; this seems to be a really common firmware bug. As long as your network is robust, youre probably okay, but you should be aware of this bug. If the camera stops providing video, power-cycle it. (This is where PoE can come in handy.) The manufacturer has assured me that theyll take a look and try to figure out whats going on, as has the NDI SDK team. I could fairly reliably (accidentally) reproduce the failure as follows: 1. Open an NDI connection to the camera. 2. Disconnect the network for a while (no idea how long — maybe a minute or two). 3. Reconnect the network. 4. Try to reestablish the connection. Or instead of waiting, reboot the computer. That has the same effect. While in the crashed state, the camera responds to low-level network traffic (DNS service discovery), so NDI apps can see the camera, but you cant get video or audio packets from the camera. PTZ control is also nonfunctional, whether over the NDI protocol or VISCA-over-TCP (didnt try VISCA-over-UDP). In short, some critical process in the camera likely crashed or froze and never came back or got restarted. One other thing to be aware of is that the SDI connection sticks out a long way. Ive seen this on some other SDI gear as well, so this isnt unusual for SDI hardware, but it is baffling. Im not sure why they didnt use a standard BNC connector and went with one that sticks so much farther than normal, but it is what it is. Be aware of the snag risk. Also, be aware that the green block thats sticking out of your camera when you get it is a removable terminal block. It isnt obvious that it is unpluggable at a glance; I realized this when I bought a camera from another manufacturer, and they shipped a similar block, but in a plastic bag. Its probably worth unplugging that immediately unless you plan to use it, because having extra plugs sticking out the back of the camera is an accident waiting to happen, IMO.

Perfect set up for livestream and we just bought a 3rd camera from them and it matched. Works great upside down too. Mounts work well. We did POE for all three.