Andrew wrote:

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

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