Honeywell announced the launch of its Rapid Eye Hybrid HD digital video recorder (DVR). With 16 channels capable of supporting images from analogue and IP surveillance cameras, the hybrid nature of the DVR makes it an ideal solution for customers at all stages of their journey from analogue to IP, providing a flexible, scalable offering that allows them to migrate at their own pace.  Additional IP cameras can be installed without the need for extra licenses and Rapid Eye Hybrid HD will automatically identify their dynamic address on a network.

Rapid Eye Hybrid HD can record, search and transmit video, audio and data transactions while simultaneously providing users with both live monitoring and post-event playback operation. Significantly, the product’s highly interactive user interfaces – complete with PTZ mouse control - are available remotely, locally and at a limited bandwidth, offering customers increased ease of use and flexibility of operation which in turn reduces training time and boosts employee productivity.

The Rapid Eye Hybrid HD has the added benefit of full integration with the suite of Honeywell security products including MAXPRO VMS, WIN-PAK and Pro-Watch access control platforms. This robust access control integration, combined with its strength as a loss prevention analysis tool with an in-built, PCI compliant, data capture capability makes Rapid Eye Hybrid HD DVR a perfect application for retail deployments in particular.

The range of data storage options offered by Rapid Eye Hybrid HD runs from 500 GB to 4 TB. In order to optimise its storage capacity, the product uses H.261/263 proprietary codecs to compress images providing better picture quality, lower file sizes and more video storage volume than an MPEG-4 model.

Other features that boost the product’s effectiveness include Rapid Clip – which simplifies, speeds up and protects remote clip generation to a USB device or internal DVD-RW – and the Rapid Eye with Active Alert option which incorporates eight channels of intelligent video analytics and standard Rapid Eye functionality to enable false alarm reduction.

“There is a general acceptance across the industry that the ubiquitous adoption of IP is a case of ‘when, not if’, however customers across different sectors and geographies are not all in a position, financially or otherwise, to migrate today,” said Redo Bezzo, Product Manager EMEA at Honeywell Security Group. “Not only does the Rapid Eye Hybrid HD DVR deliver impressive functionality in a range of scenarios, it also provides our customers with choice. This is a valuable commodity in today’s business environment.”