I don't know if it's been mentioned here before or not ( even by me ?) but I've noticed in the past few years at the various shows that there is more and more (especially) CCTV equipment that is being distributed, more or less direct, from other parts of the world. Obviously, much of the equipment that we obtain is mfg'd in other countries but backed by US companies and US distributors. Some of this CCTV equipment "looks" to be of good quality with equal and sometimes better features than US supplied equipment .... at lower prices. Certainly, a major concern about buying this equipment "direct" or from small local sales rep offices for these foriegn mfgs, is the lack of technical help, limited parts supply, possible long lead times obtaining out of stock parts and the language barrier or lack of technical knowledge of the reps when you have a technical problem. But, again, the price of the equipment is VERY good and the capability of the equipment (if you do your homework) is as good or better than than available through our regular distributors.
What brought this to mind was the spam post about buying China mfg security equipment and a situation that I ran into a few months ago. When doing a service call for one of my long time commercial customers I noticed that he'd had a CCTV system put in his industrial building. Four camers around the perimiter, a monitor, DVR and internet remote viewing. All for about $2000.00. I would have probably charged about $4K. The cameras weren't set up all that good as far as what they were seeing and the picture quality was just so - so. But even so, for $2K it was well worth it. Anyway, the customer said that he hadn't had need to call the guy back since it was installed but wanted to know if I could change some of the perameters on the DVR. Long story short, there wasn't a single part number, serial number, bar code, brand name ...... nothing..... on the DVR to identify it. I wouldn't be surprised if the cameras were the same. I couldn't quite get at the power supplies for the cameras without being to obvious to my customer, but there's a possibility that the power sources are not the standard 12 or 24 volts either.
So .... my conclusion is .... this guy is probably buying equipment direct from some foriegn supplier and has all his customers locked in with no possiblility of anyone else being about to service or supply parts for "his" jobs. As long as he can keep a decent supply of parts on hand so as to have replacements and\or no delivery problems, he's in good shape.
I don't know whether to congratulate or condem him.