SOME BASICS OF DIGITAL BUS VIDEO SYSTEMS TO BE AWARE OF:

MULTIPLE CAMERAS:
With digital systems you can now get true hi-resolution images from multiple cameras all operating at the same time.
Most professional platform systems will support up to 4 cameras internally multiplexed, meaning they do not have to share the frame rate.

FRAME RATES:
If you see a specification of 30 FPS (frames per second) this is great, until you purchase it and then later find you have 4 cameras sharing 30 FPS, so your state of the art recording system looks more like a 1930's movie camera with stop frame playback!
To prevent this from happening make sure the system has "30 FPS per camera" and they are not sharing the frame rate.

EXTERIOR CAMERAS:
STOP ARM cameras to catch those drivers with the "I will get there on time even if it kills you" attitude, are getting more and more common to catch and document for law enforcement those who violate Stop Arms, flashing light and child safety by passing school busses while they are loading or unloading.

NIGHT VISION CAMERAS:
Camera with night vision capability via Infra Red Illumination LEDs or image intensification are available at the same prices from some manufacturers now to school systems. There are times when the bus may be operated in low light such as early morning, evening or on field trips. Early trips in the winter months are in almost total darkness, so this feature permits limited use when the sunlight is not enough to light up the bus, or if field trips or sports events are taken in this bus, as they are often after sunlight hours.

FREE ON SCREEN MAPPING
FMI currently offers Free On screen Mapping during playback with all their GPS equipped DVRs sold, such as the FMI-CF-GPS, FMI-CF2-GPS, FMI-HD-GPS & FMI-HDP-GPS all of which are priced on our sites. While another first offered this mapping feature it was available via a hardware mechanism that consumed one of your DVRs video channels limiting the 4 channel DVR to 3 cameras only with mapping at a considerable additional cost, FMI is the American manufacturer who deserves recognition for providing this free of charge to all customers of their GPS equipped DVR systems As their path to the same goal was via software not hardware, not only can they deliver this to their GPS customers free of cost, they also do not clog up a video channel with mapping, so their 4 channel DVRs actually record 4 cameras full time even with mapping. *Note: Free On Screen Mapping feature requires program access to the Internet for Google provided map & zoom features. This feature is disabled if Internet access not permitted.

SYSTEM WARRANTY:
2 Year Warranty is now offered on some systems, and this should be a clue to who really stands behind their products. Why get a 1 year product warranty and get screwed for the next year when you can get 2 year DVR protection free?
I am confident all reputable manufacturers will soon adopt this same 2 year DVR warranty, it just might take them some time to see that the customers want this added protection.
All manufacturers who claim to offer your district a quality system should back up their claims of quality with a full 2year DVR warranty on the complete digital system! Get it in writing before you talk any further. Should they balk that this is not needed, tell them that their competition offers a full 2 year DVR warranty, and put it in your bid specs, as only then will reputable manufacturers step up to the plate and do the right thing for their customers.

FREE GPS SPEED & PASSIVE TRACKING:
Free GPS Speed & Passive Tracking Information is available on some systems.
(With the advent of "multiplexed buses" it is now more difficult then ever to attach any electronic device to a new bus without interfering with the bus electronics. The old days of tapping into the speed signal for the bus video systems to display speed are long gone. The best way to provide speed to those who wish to show that in the video record, is via a small GPS antenna kit. This will in no way interfere with any bus function as it is not connected to any bus electrical connection.

PROPRIETARY HARD DRIVES
American school districts have been getting ripped off for years now with this "propriety hard drive" scam from a foreign manufacturer who will remain unnamed. It is time to send a clear message that American school districts have had enough of this raw deal and start exercising our freedom of choice by choosing to spec a system we will not be forced to pay up to 10 times the cost for a hard drive when they fail from some foreign predator. By only accepting a non-propriety IDE hard drive DVR system, your district will never be tied to any product manufacturer for future hard drive replacements.

DIGITAL HARD DRIVE CAPACITY:
I constantly see bid specs listing 40 Gig Hard drives...and they say Vaudeville is dead? I am just wondering how long foreign manufacturers are going to dump outdated products by selling to American school districts? This is really nuts, my children play music on their iPODs and iPODs have larger drives than that in them. They are offering a hi-tech digital security product designed and used for litigation protection and evidence documentation and they choose a hard drive smaller than a children toy....just priceless! Less than 80 Gig hard drive is not acceptable

PANIC BUTTON:
Event / Panic button or marker or driver input terminal with event lock is a good idea.
(Unlike a VCR, a digital system can hold several months of data in it. If an important event is not "marked" it is not only possible it will eventually be recorded over, but that event may be really hard to find in hundreds of hours of video in the hard drive. When an incident occurs, the driver is to press the event marker or event button. This locks in time 5 minutes in the past to show what started the event, and 5 minutes in the future to show how it was resolved. This is the most important aspect of data marking for digital systems.)

LAPTOP HARD DRIVES ONLY:
"2.5" Shock Mounted" Laptop hard drive, providing the most durable shock resistant DVR possible is a good way to insure you are not spending money on hard drives when the large ones crash. You see the drives in your desktop PC are larger, but much more fragile. 3.5" hard drives built for PCs, are dirt cheap and can crash in mobile applications, that is why lap tops use 2.5" hard drives, the toughest lap tops in the market now use "Shock Mounted" hard drives to protect valuable data, and nothing is more valuable than video evidence in the event of a crime on your bus.

INSTALLATION
The digital bus video manufacturers "Factory Authorized" distributor service team will complete all installations (should the school systems mechanics not do the work themselves), 3rd party contractors in the past have made some very expensive mistakes and we continue to be contracted to clean up their messes by customers after the fact. (Anyone can visit the photo galleries on this site to see the reckless, thoughtless, incompetence, sheer stupidity and damage done to customer equipment and buses themselves when a non involved person is paid peanuts to install a highly sophisticated, valuable and delicate system of recording instruments in the bus. The cost of installation is a direct representation of the installers skill level and experience. This is one area "Low Bid" can be a costly mistake.

STORAGE CAPACITY & IMAGE QUALITY:
There is a inverse relationship between storage and resolution of images. The longer the system will store the images before recording over then, the poorer the image quality will be with other factors remaining constant.
This means that the salesman pushing his 6-month+ storage ability feature on you, is likely to be pushing the poorest quality images you can get, as it is a simple trade off. It is possible to make image files so small and compressed, manufacturers can now store 3-18 months on a recorder before it starts to rerecord over older images. This sounds good at first, until you see the image quality, or worse yet try to zoom in on a portion of the image to see if the child in question is holding a knife or foil wrapped stick of gum. I see no use advantage in storing several months of image files that are so small and so poor in quality they are in most cases useless. I have been advocating the industry offer high-resolution images of sufficient quality that the "zoom in" and photo manipulability these systems offer, are of some use.
After several years, it would seem someone is listening for the requests for better image quality. The new SV & FMI digital systems