DVR Security System Review

The Q-See QSPDVR04 DVR card is an ideal DVR card solution for those who are on a tight budget. Surprisingly the card has quite a lot of features considering its price, you can attach four security cameras to your PC by using this card. You have the option of attaching more than one Q-See DVR card to your system if you want to add more surveillance cameras. If you install this DVR card on its own, it is capable of recording video at 25 FPS (frames per second), the resulting video can prove choppy.

If you mean to attach more than one of these DVR cards to your PC this will improve the overall frame rate of your recorded video. If you add four of these Q-See DVR cards to your system you increase the frame rate to 100 FPS making video much smoother. A variety of cameras are compatible with the card include pan tilt and zoom cameras, IP cameras and night vision cameras to name a few. The FPS values mentioned apply to PAL recording and playback, when recording or playing video in NTSC format the values increase by 20%

Typically Q-See DVR cards include their ‘Super DVR’ software that enables you to view the output from multiple cameras on one monitor. The Q-See QSPDVR04 also includes ‘Super DVR’ and this also enables you to control your cameras from your PC. ‘Super DVR also has an interface enabling you to adjust the motion sensor capabilities of your cameras. One of the most useful features of the DVR cards software is its interface with Internet Explorer, this enables you to view camera activity form a variety of locations.

The Q-See QSPDVR04 DVR card has five different recording quality levels and is capable of scheduling the recording times of your security system. You don’t need a high spec PC but some features may prove problematic if you are using a non Intel based chipset. The DVR card operates under Windows 2000 and XP and you need an 800 mhz processor with 256 MB of RAM as well as an 80 gigabyte hard drive.

Check the latest price on the Q-See QSPDVR04 4 Channel PCI DVR Card

Note: This card is identical one produced by Swann, you can read a review of that here

Technical Specifications
Video Input

4 Cameras

Audio Input

PC Audio 1 Channel

Video Output

1 Ch VGA video output

Video Resolution

320×240 (NTSC) 352×288 (PAL)

Recorder Media

HDD, USB Disk, ZIP, CD-R/W
Record Mode

Schedule/Manual Motion/Sensor/

Recording Rate

25 fps(PAL), 30 fps(NTSC)

Compression format

MPEG4

Network

TCP/IP

I/O Device

4 Ch Input, 1 Ch Relay Output
PTZ

Protocol Configurable, Remote Control Capability

Remote Software

Support Internet Explorer Web Browser