Oudoor CCTV Camera

[stillnobodyhome]

an e-mail about this today .Anyone got one .Is it any good ? It's certainly cheap enough . Stuart

[George]

IR leds that are too near the camera lens will give you a halo effect and the image in the center will darken.

At least thats what the two different round cameras I bought off ebay did.

So I just purchased a camera on its own and this...

camera sits on top of the IR lamp and is giving me a perfect night time viewing at the back of the property.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Looks identical to my Swan one. They aren't very good. They last about a year outdoors before water gets in. A thought which has occured to me is to unscrew the 2 halves when brand new and apply silicone grease to the O-ring, as that might make them last longer, but it breaks the "warantee voided" seal. The failure mode I've seen in a few of them when water does get in is that the automatic iris gets stuck in the closed down state, which is really bizzare as it's electronic, not mechanical. A power-cycle restores it. Another issue is that the scan is interlaced. This makes it rather hard to get a usable still frame unless the subject is stationary. When I needed one, I ended up in photoshop for a couple of hours, shifting alternate scan lines back and forth to try and merge the two shifted images into one usable one. The IR leds only light up a small area in the centre of the field of view, although they do throw a long way. They are the type of IR LED which is visible dimly to the eye too.

[Mathew Newton]

naked eye?

Mathew

[George]

this...

> For that particular unit can you see the illuminated LEDs with the > naked eye?

Close up,very faintly...at a distance of 3.5m hardly.

[jim]

interesting.... to what distance would you say it illuminates adequately ? I see on Ebay its from Hong Kong - any bother? how lng did it take to come?

thanks in advance Jim

[George]

The lamp has a central fixed illumination, that is to say the light is brighter in the middle and then it fades off but still illuminates on the outer fringe. Distance is good in total darkeness about 15 to 20 foot but fails if there's light either side of it,on saying that if we already have street lighting ect then we wouldn't need the IR lamp. ;-)

This is its brother,will purchase this one for the front of the house but have a hidden camera.

[George]

Sorry, left your other question out.

No bother with it coming from HongyKongy,took about 15 working days to come.

[Geo]

Power supply: DV012V Power consumption: 200mA

Contents:

9V AC/DC adaptor

???

Geo

[geoff]

In message , George writes

There's staying power for you ..

[Mathew Newton]

Okay, thanks.

[George]

I've read a few articles on the led wavelength and most have said this... Wavelength IR LEDs come in various wavelengths, most commonly 940 nm, 880 nm (like the aforementioned Siemens LEDs), and 840 nm. Which would be best for this application?

The 840 nm LEDs tend to be barely visible, since their spectral half-width is wide enough to overlap the extreme red portion of the visible spectrum.

880 nm and 940 nm wouldn't be visible, but they might be too far into the infrared for the camera - I don't know how fast IR sensitivity drops off. Obviously, some testing is in order.

So I stayed with the 850nm to be on the safe side of the cameras available to work with IR night time viewing.

What you have to understand is there's a lot of cameras about that give poor visabilty at night time and fail with IR because they're of poor design and low light.

The one I have in the back of the house was gotten from a car boot sale and is only B&W but its low lux was ideal for the IR lamp and is giving good results in complete darkness as there is no light whatsoever at the back of this house.

[Andrew Gabriel]

One thing that did surprise me with the colour day/night cameras is that it's not a simple switch between day mode (colour) and night mode (IR shown as black and white), but each pixel seems to decide by itself. So you can have the camera operating at night with the image in black and white, except that if there is something in the field of view which is lit up brightly e.g. due to an outside light, that bit of the image will be in full colour. Don't know if they all do this though.