The bench test 2: Home comforts

What our experts say

The Eneo DLR1, on the other hand, could easily be mistaken for a digital TV receiver or any one of half a dozen consumer electronic gizmos, so if discrete and unobtrusive is on your list of desirable features in a DVR this rather neat little machine definitely deserves your attention.

It's a 4-channel design, which undoubtedly contributes to the compact shape, but apart from that the specification wouldn't look out of place on one of its larger and more exotic looking rivals.

The only real constraints imposed by the slimline cabinet are a lack of room for expansion. There's only space inside for a single hard drive (a 160Gb HDD is supplied as standard) and it doesn't have a CD or DVD writer for archiving and exporting recordings. A year or two ago this might have counted as a major drawback but the world has moved on.

It has a USB port and recordings can be easily copied to removable 'Pen Drive' – capacities of 1Gb or more and now commonplace – or an external hard drive, and both are faster and arguably a lot more convenient than 'burning' an optical disc. It has a LAN connection as well so images can be viewed and in theory copied on any network enabled PC.

It is a full duplex design with four looped video inputs and one audio recording channel. Maximum resolution is 720 x 576 pixels at up to 25 fps per channel in four quality settings (max 12.5fps at the highest quality setting). Video data is processed using MPEG-4 compression and as well as being very well suited to the task, it is an industry standard, though exported and archived recordings are encapsulated within a self-contained viewer utility, so there is no need for any specialised software.

Other highlights include an RS-232 interface for connecting the unit to ATM or POS devices, for superimposed text recording. It has email notification and a 2x digital zoom facility on playback. There's a motion detector with alarm event recording and output and it has some PTZ control facilities. It comes with an infrared remote control and Remote Administration Software (RAS) for network viewing, search and playback and configuration.

In common with several other DVRs we have seen recently the DLR1 uses a version of the Linux operating system. This is rapidly becoming the OS of choice for this application, and for good reason thanks to its compact size, speed and inherent reliability.

The front panel really doesn't give much away. On the far left side there's a row of three LEDs for Power On, Record mode and Alarm, and below that is the USB port. In the middle there are the four camera/channel selector buttons which also double up on PTZ functions and next to those is another group of four buttons for mode and menu selection, PTZ select and Panic recording. The latter overrides all other functions and puts the machine instantly into record mode. On the far right there's a circular cluster of keys for playback control and menu selection and navigation.

The rear panel is equally sparse. The left side is taken up with a bank of nine BNC sockets that carry the four camera inputs plus their associated loop-throughs and the CVBS monitor output. Above that is a pair of phono sockets for audio input and output and to their right is a recessed slide switch for selecting CVBS or VGA monitor output. Next to the switch is the VGA port and in the centre of the panel there's an Ethernet port. Finally, on the left side of the panel there is a bank of spring terminal connections for alarm input and outputs, the RS 232 port and the mains power socket.

Inside the box there's pretty much what you would expect to find, the mainboard, a mains power supply, the hard drive and a few cables.

Setup and operation

Recording begins as soon as the machine has booted up, which takes less than a minute. In its unconfigured state there's a choice of single, quad or sequenced single screen display and instant playback with a choice of four fast playback speed, picture freeze and step frame. Search facilities during replay are fairly rudimentary which a pop-up menu offering a choice between 'Go to First', 'Go To Last', 'Date/Time', 'Event' and Text Input'.

Access to the setup menus requires a 4-digit PIN and it opens either in Quick Setup mode, which just covers the basics, or the full menu display. The latter displays eight icons headed System, Device, Record, Event Action, Display, Network, Password and Config. Selecting one using the front panel keys, or more conveniently, via the remote control, displays a drop-down sub-menu.

The System sub-menus deal with System Information, Date and Time setup, System Check (configuration and alarm notification), Storage (HDD information), System Logs and Shutdown. The Device menu includes Camera setup (enable/disable and ID, composed using 'virtual on-screen keyboard) and Alarm inputs, Motion Detector setup (Sensitivity 1-5 and target enable on a 16 x 12 grid), Text Input Recording (from ATM/POS), Alarm Output, Audio (on/off and camera association) and RS232 configuration.

The Record sub-menus cover Resolution (High/Standard) plus End of Disk action, Panic Recording options etc. Here too are sub menus for setting individual camera recording speed and quality in time-lapse and pre-event recording modes.

On the Event Action menu there are settings for individual camera speed and quality during an alarm event, motion detection activation, Text Input recording, and Video Loss. The OSD menu has two sub-menus for setting up the on-screen display and the sequence dwell time on the main monitor screen. Network Setup, as the name implies, is concerned with LAN settings (IP Address, Subnet Mask, passwords etc), DVR Name Server setup, Callback Centre (contacting network computer following an alarm event) and email notification setup. The Password menu sets user and administrator permissions and finally the Config menu switches between the Full and Quick Setup menu, copying clips to a USB device, loading default settings, saving setup and Clear All Data.

For network operation it is necessary to install the Remote Administration System (RAS) software onto a Windows 2000 or XP PC. The program opens with three options, RAS Administration, 'RAS Watch' (remote viewing) and 'RAS Search'. It's all fairly straightforward, though the RAS program is generic and clearly originally designed for more sophisticated set-ups and there are some unused facilities and a few minor configuration issues to sort out before the two can connect. There are also some discrepancies between the manuals for the DVR and the RAS program and the remote login procedure isn't very well explained by either of them.

The Admin screen covers network configuration, passwords etc plus event and system logs. The Watch screen includes camera selectors and display mode, there's also picture setup controls (brightness, saturation, contrast and hue) as well as buttons for PTZ and Alarm control. The Search screen displays recordings on the DVR defined by event or time and date. The latter features a very convenient and easy to navigate time-line display and this is a huge improvement over the DVR's own Search menu.

eneo’s DLR1 is a good value option for its target markets...

A few niggles

Generally speaking the DLR1 is simple to setup and use but there are a few niggles. It's not always easy to tell the difference between live display and replay display, which says something for picture quality – more on that in a moment – but the only obvious on-screen indicator is a red dot in the bottom left hand corner of the screen when it is in record/live mode.

The potentially more troublesome gripe concerns the lack of any disk usage indicator. In short there's no way of knowing how much disk space remains before old data is overwritten or how much recording time you are getting, for each change in frame rate or recording quality.

It could be days or weeks for all you know and there appears to be no way of protecting a recording or sequence, which raises the possibility that potentially important data could be lost without warning.

Motion detector setup is a tad quirky. At first glance it looks fairly conventional and the configuration screen displays a grid of 16 x 12 targets.

However, these have to be selected or disabled in blocks of 4, which effectively changes the target grid resolution to a 4 x 12 matrix, making it difficult to define (or exclude) very small areas.

Digital video recording is a demanding application and DVRs have a tendency to run quite warm (worryingly hot in some cases) and a small poorly ventilated case can exacerbate the problem. Not in this instance, though, and the DLR1 remains cool to the touch; the trade-off is a small and obviously quite powerful fan that is unfortunately quite noisy.

Exporting recordings to a USB memory module proved to be unexpectedly difficult. It is possible there is a bug in the system as several times an attempt to copy a short recording crashed the machine and each subsequent attempt resulted in an increase in file size.

We did eventually manage to get it to work, and when it did it worked very well indeed, plus the built-in viewer means the recording can be played back instantly on any Windows PC.

Performance

On the highest quality settings the amount of fine detail in the recorded image is most impressive and it compares very favourably indeed with several high-end DVRs we have looked at recently.

Colours were crisp and clean, especially saturated reds, which a surprising number of DVRs have trouble rendering accurately. Noise levels were well below average and almost entirely dependent on the source signal.

Changing from the globally set 'High' to the 'Standard' resolution setting resulted in a small but noticeable reduction in detail and it would certainly be adequate for most undemanding applications.

However, the lack of a recording duration or disk usage indicator puts users in a difficult position with no way of knowing how much of an impact these settings are having.

The ability to switch seamlessly from live display to playback is an unexpected bonus and very convenient, however the replay options are let down by the clunky Search facilities when using the front panel controls or remote handset.

Picture quality over a network connection is good, though the viewer utilities impose a significant limit on picture size (approximately 1/4-size screen) and there is also a reduction in frame rate.

The three applications would benefit from closer integration and there's no local recording function, which would enhance the system's archiving capabilities, but otherwise it stacks up well against the competitors' networking software, and for once configuration went smoothly.

Audio recording quality is fine, certainly good enough to capture incidental sounds, however once again it's compromised by the lack of any indication of how much impact it has on recording duration and disk usage.