Review: Mitsubishi DX-TL4U Digital Recorder

Simple Home Security Surveilence

May 2008 By Grant Clauser

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A recent research report by Multimedia Intelligence states that the digital camera home security market will be a $1 billion business by 2012. That means that either there are a lot of paranoid people out there with stuff/family they want to protect or the technology behind the products has improved to the point that more people are willing to rely on it. Let’s face it, big guard dogs can be a great deterrant to criminal activity, but they’re high maintanance.

Mitsubishi’s digital video recorder, on the other hand, is very low maintenance, and easy to use. The system is a solution for people who want professional-quality video surveillance in their home. The heart of the system is the DX-TL4U, a four-input DVR for switching, recording, archiving and navigating out to four camera inputs. It’s compatible with a variety of pan/tilt/zoom cameras, and you can easily control the PTZ functions from the palm-sized remote the system comes with. The unit is available in 80GB, 250GB or 500GB versions.

The DX-TL4U is surprisingly easy to set up. Once the cameras are installed where you like them, just plug them into the BNC connectors in the back of the unit, hook up a video monitor or TV to the video output jack and turn it on. You can control the zoom and view of cameras from the remote or switch between cameras to focus on, for example, one particular room. Navigating around the camera views is easy as is recording. You can record either based on schedule actions (such as motion detecting or scheduled times) or via the remote, which includes a panic button.

Since the DX-TL4U is a self-contained unit, there’s no need to install software or configure networks if you want to just hook it up and start rolling. However, it is networkable via Ethernet so you can access the video feeds and control the system remotely if you like.

From the set-up menu you can control such parameters as motion detecting, video quality, alarms, schedule recordings (such as only when the babysitter’s in the house) and network setup.

One might think that since the DVR is a self-contained unit that the recordings are stuck on it, but it allows for easy transfer of recordings to flash drives. I had it capture a few recordings of some of our staff moving around the office, transferred the files to a USB drive and opened them up on my Windows PC.