My church chose this camera to produce service broadcasts, and I was given the task of integrating the camera in with our network and OBS set up. I am not very tech savvy, but I did my best, and of course I screwed it up pretty bad (learn from my mistakes, do NOT update the firmware without consulting the AVKANS tech support first…I did this using the wrong firmware update from a different company and the camera no longer had an NDI license). It took the tech team quite some time to fix my mistakes, but they were very diligent and determined to get my system running properly. The tech support rep Jenny and the tech engineer Joe worked with me until we finally got everything working. The camera itself is very impressive. I and very happy with the image quality, the zoom capacity, and the NDI function of this camera. Just PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not be like me and try to integrate this camera into your existing OBS setup unless you really know what you’re doing. The tech team is so very helpful, just contact them and let them walk you through it. You’ll save yourself a ton of headaches. Trust me, I learned the hard way!

This camera is truly amazing, picture quality is far beyond whats expected at this price point, this is my 5th camera now.

Great items

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.

Great picture quality. Used the cameras for our church streaming system. Tech support was awesome.

This camera setup very easily within a couple minutes and the picture is wonderful in HD 1920x1080. I had a custom wood housing built for it and secured it with a screw fastener purchased from ACE for $5. This is the second PTZ camera in our church setup and it is controllable with the identical remote control of our other camera. It is an easy setup when using the included remote. I use an HDMI wireless zero latency transmitter that works perfectly to eliminate wires. The HDMI system was $250 but works perfectly with no lag. Altogether the camera and transmitter were less than $1000 and work just PTZ Optics. Awesome value. Streamed our Sunday service the next day and the camera team LOVES it. Our 2-camera PTZ system works awesome.

We purchased both the 20x and 30x cameras for use in our church. Their performance have been rock solid for several months. Picture clarity and color have been a big step up for our livestream services. There are plenty of features via the remote control, including image flip, zoom speeds and up to 10 preset frames. You can control up to 4 separate cameras with the same remote control. We had been planning on purchasing a separate PTZ controller, but the remote works so well that we see no reason to expend the time and money for another device and cabling. Remember to use the remote control from the front quadrant to get clear reception. We may purchase another camera to fill out our coverage. Overall a great value for a great camera!

We bought 3 camera for Sikh temple and all working very good

Great camera with good remote features. I had a little trouble connecting to my computer. I got a call from the company Tech support, and they resolved the issue quickly. Thanks to Jenny!

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.