[Greg McKaskle]

Most of the IP style security cameras can be made to work as long as they produce either jpeg or mjpeg formatted images.

The Axis cameras follow a pretty consistent API, and should be pretty interchangeable. I haven't seen anything that makes the other Axis cameras appealing within the price range for FIRST. Features such as interchangeable lens, a programmatic way to request a portion of an image, would be nice, but don't seem to be available.

If testing a camera from another manufacturer, you'll need to modify the http requests to match what the camera expects. This is certainly doable, probably in one day. Be sure to evaluate the camera lag. Especially on the low end, the cameras may not have HW accelerated jpeg encoding, and that can introduce quite a bit of additional lag meaning that the robot is measuring and responding to events in the past, and once the lag gets to be more than a few hundred ms, it makes it very difficult to use.

Greg McKaskle