Industry vet launches new camera company Innovative Security Designs

IRVINE, Calif.—The reason so many analog cameras are still being installed, says Ian Johnston, industry veteran and CEO of a new camera company called Innovative Security Design (ISD), is that IP cameras are “largely the same as they were five years ago.”

“Everyone talks about resolution,” he said, but the issue with IP cameras is that “getting IP cameras up and running is such a pain.”

Johnston, who was CTO of IQInvision until August of last year, aims with his new company to rectify the difficulties associated with installing IP cameras. ISD is showing its new camera at ISC West in various partner booths including  Network Optix and Veracity booths.

The camera will be beta-tested in a casino and a campus environment “where they want a ton of cameras but they don't want a ton of infrastructure.” It will be ready to be shipped “in quantity by the end of May,” Johnston said.

Johnston said that his camera does reinvent the wheel. “It's a high quality megapixel camera that includes features that make it simple to install and it's scalable.”

Those features include the ability of the camera to assign itself to a recording device. And once it's installed, a universal remote control “from Walmart” can be used to change the field of view, check the IP address, and check to see if it's recording, he said.

Installers “no longer have to balance and pray they don't drop their laptop.”

A motorized zoom and focus is something Johnston wanted to have “as part of the default set.”

Johnston predicted that 2012 would include a “dramatic shift” where instead of “monolithic boxes where the server is king … the cameras will talk to one another and scream if one goes down. They'll police themselves.”

The ISD camera will run $800 to $1,200 depending on how it's configured.

Johnston said one reason integrators go with analog cameras in certain installations is because “if they know a camera is fairly twitchy and there's no network engineer on site,” they'll push an analog camera instead of an IP camera.

With ISD, he predicts this will change.

ISD is working with a team of six people that includes Julie Lake, who was previously with Arecont Vision. ISD received an undisclosed amount of initial funding from a group of investors whom Johnston said are in the video surveillance world already and are “highly invested in making IP cameras simple.”