NDI PTZ Camera - 30X Auto Tracking Live Streaming Cam with SDI/HDMI/IP Outputs for Church Worship School Sport Hospital Wedding(NDI HX2 and NDI HX3)

I have had the Avkans 30X NDI PTZ camera for two weeks. I have put it through it's paces to see how well it preforms. I used differant control proticols, differant lighting situations with strong to low light. I tested it's speed and accuracy with presets. I tested it's 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 it's 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. It's 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 it's quality and preformance.

Great company reputation. Great price. Fast shipping. Well packaged. Arrived on time. Works great. Quiet operation. Sturdy build. I would recommend.

I bought 2 because of the Black Friday sale and I was not disappointed. However they are a great value for a PTZ camera. These cameras are well built and don't feel cheap. The video quality in my opinion is excellent. However, that is in my studio with optimal lighting, with my lighting the picture impressed me it was crisp and clear and the images popped, good separation. You do have the ability to change setting to improve picture quality, but I didn't have to. Zoom is good and it is easy to pull focus with the controller. The auto tracking works but I haven't used it long enough to give an informed opinion other than it worked when I tried it. The web interface is pretty good as well but I got the controller, so I haven't used the software much with these cameras, setting up presets is very intuitive. I had no problem setting up presets.

This this is amazing. We love the AI tracking. Very easy to use and setup. One thing I’d like to see, the joystick isn’t programmable. I’d like pushing forward to go down and pulling backwards to go up. For me they are ‘reversed’ Excellent picture quality. Autofocus works great The ability to run this via CatV wiring was a huge selling point. No excess wiring for the camera or controller. White balance works great

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 I'm 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, I've written large amounts of custom software to throw commands at the device, enabling me to see exactly what does and doesn't work. I'm 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 camera's limitations are something you can work with, and I hope the manufacturer addresses the firmware limitations I've 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. It's 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 wasn't 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 you're using the camera in a conference room, you'll probably eventually run into a situation where you really need exposure compensation. That said, in most indoor environments, it shouldn't 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. It's worth noting, however, that neither NewTek's video monitor app nor Sienna's 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; I've tested the same code on Marshall's 4K cameras, and it works, so I'm 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 you'd 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 you're 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; it's 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 couldn't 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. I've seen the same bug with 4K30 cameras from Marshall and 4K60 cameras from NewTek. In other words, I'm pretty sure the problems I'm having are probably in the NDI SDK itself (or perhaps in their sample code). Besides the zoom speed bugs, there's 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, you're 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 they'll take a look and try to figure out what's 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 can't get video or audio packets from the camera. PTZ control is also nonfunctional, whether over the NDI protocol or VISCA-over-TCP (didn't 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. I've seen this on some other SDI gear as well, so this isn't unusual for SDI hardware, but it is baffling. I'm not sure why they didn't 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 that's sticking out of your camera when you get it is a removable terminal block. It isn't 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. It's 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.

Why did you pick this product vs others?: Good specs and inexpensive. The image quality, autofocus and speed of motors is great. Documentation is a bit lacking as far as configuring the IP address of the camera is concerned, but support is great. Just email them and they will respond quickly. They used Team Viewer to connect to my computer then downloaded the correct software and configured the cam and now I know how to do it myself.

I don't write many reviews, but I'd like to for this AVKANS PTZ camera. We needed a high quality camera for live streaming about 25 events a year. Our attendees are top marketing executives including those in the TV and Video media. We also needed it to be a bit more affordable than the big-name solutions. It has performed perfectly using both NDI and HDMI mode under challenging lighting conditions. We have only one person doing streaming, slide/video content control and camera control. The camera is easily controllable over ethernet/IP connection with macros or the web-based page. The image quality is superb, autofocus surprisingly fast, even fully zoomed from 75 feet back (real zoom, not digital). We had an error show up during our last show, and AVKANS tech support answered the email immediately, scheduled a remote live diagnosis with me. They identified a problem needing an RMA to resolve. I returned it in a Friday night - talked with a technician on Saturday night, and had the camera back by Tuesday morning with the issue fully resolved. Like I said in the title - amazing support to go with the fully capable product.

After using this camera for five months, I can honestly say that this was one of our best purchases for our church. This camera checked all the boxes for me. I was debating whether to get an HDMI camera or an SDI camera for our church and this camera has both and more. We stream our services globally and we usually get asked "what type of camera are you using?" I'm powering this camera with POE which kills three birds with one stone. (1) power supply requirements (2) NDI to grab video and audio from the network (3) Quick access to the settings by typing in the IP address in a browser. The 30x zoom is the camera to get for churches and this camera works well with our existing Sony Joystick remote. We're using this camera for video only and our audio comes from our sound board so I was glad to see that the camera has an audio in port to embed the sound board audio with our video feed. With this setup we can distribute the HDMI feed to other TVs to share the broadcast throughout the church. I did have an issue not getting any audio out of the HDMI port at first and after a quick email to the seller I was told to go into "setup" on the camera (using the remote) and then change the DVI Mode to HDMI. This didn't work for me but after powering down the camera for 15 seconds and powering it back up again, the audio and video came in crystal clear through HDMI. Even though the manual is not very in-depth, the Seller is super responsive to emails. I have plans of picking up another camera in the future.

Our church in February bought two 30x PTZ NDI cameras from Avkans via Amazon. Of all available options on the market, our choice was obvious - good quality and affordable price. We decided to install both cameras on a balcony in our church, where we have the best view. There are no power outlets in the spots we designated for the cameras to turn them on. So, having other camera types than NDI wasn’t an option for us. With just the use of internet cable, we supply power to cameras, receive a great picture, and control PTZ. Overall, the camera’s performance is great. When we bought cameras, the only wrong thing with them was the different firmware on each camera. So, we decided to upgrade them to the latest version. We contacted Avkans, and they provided us with instructions and the software. One camera was upgraded successfully, but another one, unfortunately, got an error message during the upgrade. So, we contacted Avkans again to fix this. Need to say, their response was quick. After the unsuccessful attempt to fix it, Avkans sent us the replacement camera, and we were lucky enough to get it before Easter. Avkans showed great care for the customers and stood behind their products and services. We highly recommend Avkans, as it will save you a significant amount of money without compromising quality, and you can always rely on their service and excellent customer support.

Excellent value and service

I needed help with setting up my NDI and Jenny helped me remotely from across the world and made everything work properly. Very good equipment and will keep buying more

Super PTZ camera at very good price