Home CCTV

Not for me, someone at work was asking.

Looking for a recommendation for a home CCTV system. Requirement is basically to point a camera out of the bedroom window onto the driveway below, and review the footage on a TV (or presumably, computer screen) at a later date.

I know nothing about this sort of thing. Any ideas where to start?

Cheers.

Maplin constantly have deals on CCTV kits. Prices seem good.

What, so they can see folk wearing hoodies who are going to break in from the back?

Oh, scratch that, they’ll probably take the camera as well 🙂

tis for making sure no ones parking on your driveway innit.

😉

Got one of the Maplin ones at home (aka Fort Knox). They all seem to suffer from poor image quality at anything more than about 10′ so have upgraded the cameras. Avoid the ebay stuff unless you know what you are buying, mate had his café done and when we looked at the playback there was lump moving in a grey background. Not exactly admissible quality.

Kev

CCTV42 are good – http://www.cctv42.co.uk/

They have lots and lots of example screengrabs on their site showing what you can expect from different cameras under different light conditions, and best placement for them.

As said, the cheap stuff can be terrible, some are so bad you wouldn’t even be able to describe what someone was wearing, let alone what their face looks like.

Just bought a system from the Spain equivalent of Homebase. Smart phone operated so you can stream the video, switch it on/off remotely and so on. 250 euros and came with 2 cameras, extra cameras are 90 euros each or 20 euros for an identical dummy one. Image quality is pretty good; with the more expensive one you could also zoom and pan remotely.

If it could temporarily suspend human rights and then fire off a shotgun cartridge as well it would be perfect…

I’ve got some EyeSpy 247 ones, as has someone at work who bought the Maplins ones first and got fed up them breaking.

They are pretty good, as they stream the images, and can save the offline to a website for a fee, plus the do motion alerts etc.

Very useful for when people come around ‘collecting ladybirds’ or working out if you missed a courier 🙂

You need a very high quality/resolution cameras to recognise a face at 20 feet in poor light. If you want it to work at night, you need decent IR lights as well..

I recently had cause to review CCTV from a variety of systems, and one chap had this in his house

http://www.storageoptions.com/products/cctv/diy-home/diy-home-cctv-plus

which was very good.

I can confirm from personal experience the EyeSpy247 HD camera, has sufficient resolution to identify someone’s face in poor light.

The IR is also very good, if anyone wants a video clip sample I will upload it somewhere. I have some footage of a local fox somewhere

The IR is also very good, if anyone wants a video clip sample I will upload it somewhere. I have some footage of a local fox somewhere

yes please, buying a decent Security cam is on my To do list, just not worked out which one yet….