Mr. Nakamura, Development Team

JVC's IP cameras have a longer history than you'd expect.
JVC got an early start selling the V.Networks series to world markets as a network camera series for surveillance applications. Naturally, in the Japanese market the series began to sell years earlier than those from other major manufacturers. Nearly 10 years have passed since then.
Presently manufacturers around the world are manufacturing and selling network surveillance cameras, but JVC's V.Networks series, with its 10-year history, has earned a particularly strong reputation for reliability. In this section we interview an engineer about the history and reliability of V.Networks.

- When were JVC's network cameras first produced?

We first sold the JVC surveillance network camera in 1999. We launched the VN-C1 compact camera, with fixed focus, and the VN-C2, which had the same body and also included a pan and tilt function (but no zoom). The commercial network cameras sold by others at the time were sets with an analog camera and encoder unit, and only JVC and Axis were selling integrated surveillance network cameras, as I recall. In the following year, 2000, JVC released the VN-C3 series, which integrated pan, tilt and zoom functions, and then in 2001 we offered the VN-C30, a high image quality pan, tilt and zoom network camera using CCD technology. We were also early in achieving some of the basic functions of network cameras, including distribution of the now common JPEG and MPEG (at the time, MPEG-1) formats, web server function and access security level settings, so in the three years from the start of sales in 1999 through 2001, we brought out a lineup of six models, and I think it's fair to say we had already created a foundation for the current V.Networks. At the time, if you talked about surveillance systems, everyone knew you meant analog, but the VN-C30 offered excellent image quality and was the most popular model in the V.Networks series back then.

- What led to the start of the V.Networks series?

As a product, V.Networks fused JVC's network device development technology with our analog surveillance camera technology. It's well known that JVC has a long history-over 40 years-with analog surveillance cameras. As far as network devices are concerned, few people know it, but JVC was actually developing data communications technology with near infrared radiation used in TVs, etc., as well as developing optical wireless networks. In this business area, additionally, JVC successfully developed the industry's first Ethernet fully compatible high speed optical wireless LAN.
The beginning of V.Networks came about when we aimed to develop products for the high speed network era that would soon arrive and we took the initiative to combine our mature analog camera technology with innovative network communications technology. The pan and tilt mechanism on the VN-C2 and other models we initially sold took its prototype from the compact drive mechanism we had achieved with the optical wireless LAN products of the time.

- How did things develop between then and now?

Needless to say, since our initial V.Networks products, we have been adding functions and enhancing performance to meet market needs and we've filled out the lineup of cameras themselves. Another major development has been the creation of solutions, including application software, so that we can suggest total surveillance system packages to our customers. All the varied monitoring and recording functions that required hardware solutions in the past-split-screen displays from multiple cameras, sequential displays, videotaping/playback and search functions, alarm processing, timer function and so on-can now be managed by software.
And not only did we expand the lineup and improve functionality; we also put great effort into enhancing the reliability of the products themselves. Even now, when we design our products, we don't just try to come up with new functions, but give a lot of thought to how products are used and consider in great detail how to avoid failures and accidents.

- When you talk about consideration for enhancing network camera reliability, what is that exactly?

Consideration for enhancing network camera reliability, I think, means thinking about product durability and safety. Unlike a TV or video deck, a surveillance camera is used in a lot of different environments, so we have to design them to operate reliably in a wide range of usage environments, severe conditions and heavy workloads. For example, there is a part called the "slip ring," which is like the heart of the PTZ camera. The slip ring is important in that it takes data from the camera portion and delivers it to the data processing portion. At the same time, it receives data without interruption while the camera is rotating 360° endlessly at high speed, so it can easily become unstable. With JVC's PTZ cameras we ensure reliable data forwarding with the slip ring by using an encoding process that takes place after image data passes through the slip ring. The slip ring does wear down as it is used. At the design stage, we considered that period when the slip ring would be worn and the connection would become less stable, so we eliminated the passage of network data through a component in this state. That change increased the reliability of network communications in the camera itself. Every manufacturer's pan and tilt camera with 360° rotation uses a slip ring. I think customers who look at it this way are likely to choose the pan and tilt camera that offers the longest use.

JVC puts its slip rings through a severe QA process, in which our standard for durability is five million rotations. As for the other operations unique to PTZ cameras, ours have the durability to zoom two million times and to focus four million times. I take pride in saying that JVC's PTZ cameras offer durability and reliability far exceeding anything that has come before.