I am looking for a CCTV Video Camera Home Security System. The only real requirements are to have the standard set of features at a decent price. There is many different makes available on ebay starting at £80 upwards but most likely the quality will be not that great. Any advice on a decent brand would be great. Thanks.
Do you plan to run dedicated CCTV wires? I'm also looking to get some installed, but I'd be looking for wifi based IP-cameras linked to my Synology server. This way I'd only need to have power at my install points.
@ wuyanxu I was planning on a wired system. I am not a huge fan of wifi and was going to go down the old fashioned route by chopping in some dedicated camera points when I rewire my house. Not fully decided yet, but having a mains powered closed system makes more sense to me for my personal needs and preferences. @adam_bagpuss Area wise I just want 1x camera at the front door and 1x at the rear which will be around 8 meters apart. Budget wise I wanted to spend around £100. I have found plenty on ebay for that kind of money. The question is are they any good at all. If they are adequate then I would be happy with that. If they are totally crud then it is a complete false economy. I am willing to spend more if I really needed too in order to get any kind of decent video quality. The main thing is for the camera to perform well in the night time. At this point I just need to get an idea of which brands are decent and which to avoid if possible. Thanks for the replies guys
£100 is an extremely tight budget for Camera that either work in very low light conditions or have IR on them. budget DVR's tend to be absolute rubbish, made in china and instructions in german. we used to these for our outdoor cameras - http://www.nitedevil.com/nitedevil-domes.html they were around £100-140 EACH genie make some good kit but again their DVRs are probably out of your price range http://geniecctv.com/ we also used to use these for budget - http://www.ezcctvonline.com/geovisi...eovision-ezcctv-?page=geovision-dvr-cards.htm Geovision PCI-e cards were great and they do make low end ones. Just add it to a PC with the software and off you go. they were around £40-60 but you would also need 2x Cameras the only way i can see it fitting to £100 budget is to get some indoor cameras for PC and point them outside but kind of lose the nighttime aspect then
Thanks for the links. I guess I will have to invest the extra money, it's pointless spending twice on this kind of thing.
We got one of these to try when we were going on away holiday, you can also get outdoor versions. Quality wise, the picture isn't the best obviously, but it's not half bad for the price, the list of features is quite good, getting them working takes a bit of effort as the instructions are in Chinglish. With regards to night vision, we had the camera pointing through a window, which kind of ruined the night vision as the LEDs reflected off the window and there was too much glare, but once the outside lights came on, you could see fine. WiFi connection seemed fine, we were never not able to connect to it, although the camera was only a few meters away from the router. It's also got a CAT5 connection though too, so you can run a cable to it. Unfortunately ours would only accept SD cards up to 2GB, the manual does say it can take larger, and accept NTFS, but I couldn't get it working. the 2GB card did last for a weeks worth of recordings though and still had ~30% space remaining on the card. Email alerts worked to start with, but then google and hotmail blocked the emails, I think because of the number of emails it would send out (like it was spamming) and something to do with not being a proper PC so I couldn't verify it on my the account. I can get a sample of the video quality if you like.
Sounds like a good option for me as I switch in between 2 computers most days. Less fuss without a DVR unit and no more space taken up. I guess the main thing is if the maker is quick to update the software for new OS's making them some what future proof. I shall give these good consideration thanks!
Everything's best done through a web browser interface rather than the included software. You log into the camera like you would a router, and you're presented with a pretty similar UI to most routers. There's also a ton of apps on Android for IP Cameras, I could only get the one that came with the camera to work eventually, but I can't really see why others shouldn't work.
It all sounds really good, miles better to spend the money on better quality cameras than settling for a lesser quality DVR kit. Mainly I wanted it for when I am in the house to decide whether to open the front door or not. I only own a basic mobile at the moment but do need to upgrade for work reasons now, just using the supplied app would suit me fine. My IP skills are not great and my desire for goodies and gadgets are non existent these days. The quickest most straight forward way is what I'm after and these seem to fit the bill. I will take a look at some other brands and see what's available. If I take my time I might be able to bag some high quality ones at a sale price. Thanks for the info
