Camera zoom vs Maximum distance

[abrahao.santana]

The cameras with Speaktrack, focus on the person who is speaking, what is the maximum distance that the user can stay from the camera so that the image has the same quality when they are only 3 meters from the camera?

[Patrick Sparkman]

The Precision 60 cameras that make up the SpeakerTrack system are capable of 20x zoom (10x optical zoom and 2x digital zoom).  As long as the room and person is well lit and there is sufficient bandwidth for HD video, there shouldn't be an issue on quality.

To give you an idea of some scenarios of using SpeakerTrack 60 with different room sizes, you can take a look at Project Workplace.

[Wayne DeNardi]

The camera can focus from 1.5m to infinity, so the person should be in focus at pretty well any distance.

The size of the person in the overall image will be relative to the zoom.  With a 20x zoom, the person would roughly be able to be 7.2x further away than viewing them with your naked eyes at the same position to see them at the same size.

The "quality" of an image is a very subjective measure and will depend on many other things (lighting, shadows, colour of person/clothing/background) and really isn't something that can be quantified easily in a forum post.

Wayne
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[kglick]

Wayne,

Might you have some input as to how well the camera would work at a distance of, say, 85' from the podium?  I have a peculiar room where mounting and angle of attack from the cam is limited.  The best place to put the cam is about 85' from the podium.

-kev

[Wayne DeNardi]

85' is a long way - you won't get a decent image of any participant at that distance.  You would be much better off locating the camera closer, either on a side wall, or suspended from the ceiling to get it in a better position to capture the podium.

[kglick]

Yeah that’s the problem. The room itself is 80x100 and the ceiling is quite 2-3 stories) high. Any camera mounted on the ceiling, even dropped down on a pole would have a very steep angle of view.

Are there any 3rd party Cams you might recommend? I see some Sony models with 30x optical zoom that claim to be compatible with, and controllable by, the codec pro.

Kev

[Wayne DeNardi]

If you want to keep the control purely through the cisco codec, that will limit significantly what is available and supportable.

If you are happy to use third party options for integration and control (and then just feed a signal to the codec via one of the HDMI inputs), that opens up the options considerably.   We do it this way for the majority of our installations with the Panasonic AW-HE40H cameras.  They will do 30x optical zoom, but can do up to an equivalent of 40x with digital zoom (although there will be some image degradation, but it may still be suitable for your use case).

[Bob Fitzgerald]

The PTZ 4K might be an option.  It has 20x optical zoom and 12x digital zoom for a combined 240x zoom.