Elmo PTC-100s w/ Polycom FX

[Gannan]

In some of our installations we connect a second PTZ camera to the Polycom FX camera port 4 using the propretary s-video/RS-232 cable supplied with the FX. We use the Elmo PTC-100s camera in some cases.

The strange part is that when we connect them they work fine. This means that you can control them with the Polycom remote when switched to camera 4.

Then it seems after a while the PTZ functions will quit working with the Polycom remote and you have to use the remote that came with the Elmo PTC-100s to move the camera.

I do belive it's a Polycom issue because you can take the Elmo PTC camera to a different Polycom machine and it works fine. The odd part also is that you can put a different Elmo PTC on the Polycom and it will work.

Opinions?

This is an odd issue I have been trying to solve for a long time and I don't have the answer. All my OS rev.s on the Fx's are the same.

[tom9933]

Gannan,
Two things to check on:
1) Check with Elmo about this as I know when that camera was first introduced they had some know incompatibility issues with Polycom. This was due to the fact that the Polycom unit expected a response back stating that it was a Sony camera. Elmo was working with Polycom about how they wanted to deal with this.
2) Related to number one, we asked Polycom to ignore the lack of response on the camera control port. They changed this for us in version 6. Basically the old version would send a command to the camera and if it didn’t get a response back (a Sony response) it would stop sending commands to that camera port. We ran into an issue with this because in some of our rooms we switch control and video external to the codec (IE the codec only thinks it has one camera attached). The problem came up that camera control would be disabled if we had the switcher switched to a vcr or document camera that did not respond when a camera control command was sent. With the newer software the commands are send regardless of a response. Now we only use the primary control port so there may still be an issue with port 4.
Hope this helps,

[Gannan]

Tremedous Help! Thanks!