Hi,
I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv systems, I have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from £40.00 to £4,000.00.
All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the car.
Thanks
Andy
Ebay is a good idea for this. But it is recording devices that take up most of the expense on a good CCTv system, so if you don't want to record the cameras, then any cheap and cheerful system will do you. It's still also a good idea to choose Black & White (Monochrome) Cameras for their very low light level attributes and detail, and it also cuts cost of lighting the area you want to survey.
Try ebay
Cameras proffesional. I have seen colour models with console going dirt cheap.
One thing though colour cameras in low light(night time) are virtually useless unless you have the system wired to a passive infared outside light.
I've found
I have found the cheap and cheerful Micromark B/W cameras to be reliable, Argos 883/0801 and quite good a low light levels. (Index were better) The thing to watch out for is the lens as this determines the field of view. If you want super deluxe night vision, then you will need "Starlight" cameras, but be prepared to pay for them. The resolution of all the cheap cameras is pretty poor, so you need to be quite close to what you are watching if you want meaningful pictures of people. The colour cameras are really only good in daylight, but can indicate to you what colours somebody was wearing. It is possible to fit one or two of the small 2.4GHz cameras into the car itself, if you are prepared to accept the battery drain, but the windows will normally fog slightly from time to time. They are quite low powered and run from 6V. CPC do these. Recording IME is best done with continuous recording on a dedicated hard disc recorder. Again, CPC do these for about £350 or less--120GB (but no audio). If you are keen to avoid failures, then a UPS is essential, a small 500W unit will normally run cameras and recorder for quite a few hours. 2.4GHz systems usually reset to channel
1 if the power is disconnected-- very inconvenient. I find that I can get 40 days continuous recording @ 2fps on to a 120GB hard disc, with four cameras at nominal high definition(relatively crap!).Avoid automatic video starting, IME, it only works with some VCRs and then not very well. Historically, Micromark cameras with pir sensing were somewhat erratic in range performance. ie worked at 20' in the morning and at 10' in the evening. This may have improved in the last two years since I measured it.
Beware of any location which has lots of spiders, these love to spin webs around cameras and the pictures can be very confusing. They will trip motion sensing if fitted IME. I now don't use motion sensing. South facing seems worst for this problem.
Strangely enough, the best feature of the cheap cameras is the audio. The sensitivity IME is excellent and a much better event trigger than motion sensing.
If you take the output of the recorder, then you can drive a modulator with this and get all cameras up on any tv in the house. Quite useful when she is expecting visitors and getting tarted up, for seeing who has arrived. If the recorder output is video only, it is not difficult to take an audio feed from one of the cameras and adding it into the modulator. It may also be worth considering feeding the audio into the living room audio system, so that any unusual loud noises can be heard as background in the room-I've never bothered with this.
Hope this helps
Regards Capitol
Maplin do a special hard disc recorder with compression that handles up to 4 standard cameras simultaneously. You can buy camera from £15 to £1500 depending on what you want but any B/W camera with low light operation is fine. Don't bother with USB cameras and a PC yet, though I think in a year or so time this will become the best solution.
In message , Capitol writes
Do these print a time and date on the recording? I understand that a recording is worthless to the police without it.
Not having the date and time isn't worthless, but it's more difficult to use the images in a court if an offence has been recorded. The culprit can easily say that the incident didn't happen on the day and time the recording was made, and so the charges brought are void if the images don't show the verified date and time. Weird but true.
And any date/time stamp has to be correct for that reason. Not just close as in +/- 5 min but correct within the granularity of the display.
You can get boxes that sit between the camera and the recorder, that will add tgis information.
I've just setup a system I'm quite happy with. It's 4 IR cameras connecting back to a dedicated PC (MPEG-4 encoding is quite CPU intensive)
I used a GV250 card, and the sofware that came with it which works well and does far more than I need, and 4 outside colour IR cameras. I got the CCTV stuff from Henry's electronics,
I put in a dedicated 200GB drive for the recordings which can just about cope with a months worth of motion detection recording, I have it set to record a few seconds before the motion. The computer is in the loft near the eves which is cool enough. It also keeps it out of the way, and should anybody break in they hopefully won't steal that too! I access it using remote desktop.
The software has the ability to publish still images (or a live stream) to a website, and I publish still images to my website for no other reason than I can...if you want the URL let me know.
Biggest problem I've noted is that the cameras are in the eves of my house and spiders are using them to make webs - not a problem during the day but they show up on IR. And one isn't working just now, but that's probably just my dodgy BNC cabling (Tip: the L shaped BNC plugs in maplins are far better to work with than the push on types). And one's been nudged whilst painting..... now, where's the ladder ?
CColin Chaplin wrote: [snipped this'n'that]
Thanks I'll remember that when I break in. :-)
But is hard a harddisk recording admissable anyway? I thought it had to be tape. Also if he is recording a public area/ someonelse property he could be done under the DPA, 15 grand fine I think!
There are exemptions in the DPA. I posted the link a few weeks ago. You can record a public area as long as the camera isn't steerable (slight simplification; read the notes at the ICO site).
Yes. Keep it to GMT, then you don't have to remember to adjust for BST. Most government systems use GMT at all times.
Regards Capitol
Yes. It can be transferred to tape or another recording medium if verified. You're not going to give away 120GB hard discs!
Regards Capitol
Purely a comment. I did not use a pc, as the ability to keep recording through our local perpetual power cuts, required a UPS of very large capacity. Also, I would not like to rely on a Windows based system for recording months at a time.
Regards Capitol
You could use Linux and Zone Minder. Linux will run for years.
Dave
Windows based systems are very stable these days and if properly configured can run for months. I have configured the PC to autologin and run the software on power-up. However, the capture card and software does allow for a scheduled reboot. Cleverly, it can also hard reboot by wiring the soft power switch through it.
Colin
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