Mines bigger than yours

[Dave Rice]

Installing two of these later in the week

DS-2DE5220I-AE 1080P 20x optical zoom with 150 metre smart IR.

Day time video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHDGogLQITE

Night time video showing how the IR adapts with the zoom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKC9nfBpgfw

This cityscape gives you a better idea of what 20x zoom can do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQwMg9HQOeo EDIT just found out it’s Hanoi (by Googling the restaurant you see’s name).

[doctoryorkie]

Mines?

Looks harmless to me. B-)

 

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[The Duke]

They look fab, I’d like one of them out the back of mine looking out over the sea at the ferries.

A quick Amazon search finds a Sony one 2mp 20x 360°× 90° with 80m ir for £240. Which to me seems a decent price.

How much is are your units. I’d imagine cheaper, as I doubt Amazon is anywhere near the cheapest for this type of kit.

In the summer we are scaffolding out the side of our house to paint it and do some work on the chimney. I may chuck one one up.

It can Partol the back yard  at night, not that it needs it, but it is very secluded, so wouldn’t hurt. And I can boat watch in the day.

Though I’ll sell it to the wife as home security, and not another toy. Could also Aim it at at my next door neighbours car (6 series bm)   and see who keeps scratching it. Or rather catch the poisonous oap from next or but one.

 

Edit-ooh a quick Google shows up £550+ for the hakivision models. I won’t be able to sell on on that much.

[Dave Rice]

£462 inc vat. There are several @ £405 but we needed the 150m IR.

Yes there are cheaper alternatives out there, there always are. But we need an integrated system and this is just one part of it.

As a one off that Amazon Sony cmos one looks OK. No PoE but I found these Passive Power over Ethernet PoE Adapter Injector + Splitters for a fiver that let you do it. Work a treat with my camera tester.

[Spedley]

Awsome, just put a cheap (£50) motion activated camera up myself.  It is very good a picking up clouds, not that great at people.

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[Ed P]

If you are a photographer moving away from DSLRs towards a Bridge camera (for size+convenience), DO NOT sell your zoom lenses on the cheap! There are numerous how-tos showing the simple mods required (to the camera end cap) which allow you to turn a 1080p raspberry pi NOIR camera into an awesome but very cheap PTZ security camera. Pity there is no way (yet) of adding FLIR on the cheap as that really would be unbeatable! (both for security and monitoring heat losses around the home)

[Richard]

Dave those cameras do look pretty stunning, however they do all appear to need a real time operator to select and zoom in on the object of interest. I fear that a few ‘fit and forget types of amateurs’ will hope to get the same advantage while scanning for wild life or low life.

This is not really going to happen quite so simply and brilliantly effectively, ‘zooming in’ after the event will not be quite the same.

Still the cameras have come on a long way over the past few years. While the price you are paying appears high against the low end kit, compared to what would pay for something considerably inferior a few years ago it is well worth going for the best your budget will allow.

[Dave Rice]

“however they do all appear to need a real time operator”

You’re quite correct. However one reason for spending a bit more is for some technical trickery.

You can have up to 300 preset positions and can set up defined patrols. This model is 3D positioning aware, so any motion detection areas you set up stay where they are in the real world, they don’t spin with the camera i.e. the motion detection area is still on the shed door even though you’re looking at the bottom of the garden (although clearly it’ll only detect the motion when it’s looking at the shed door).

Other models have auto tracking but of course if it’s looking one way it’s not looking at the other. That’s where the PanoVu cameras come in. The 16MP 360°Panoramic + PTZ is £4.1k +vat trade should you wish to monitor your local motorway junction ?

[Richard]

Dave, you have confirmed what I surmised. It is vital to confirm what you want and most of all what is essential before you buy. Items on the wish list can be nice, but if you buy something of medium quality/price and upwards you are more likely to get some of those nice to have options already. Above all, it take considerable forethought and understanding before specifying and buying.

After seeing the Japanese at work I developed the idea of the tadpole project development curve. Get the eyes out front, apply intelligence and shed loads of really hard, detailed work. Select the methods and kit you require; then the deployment and commissioning is relatively simple and easy with no nasty surprises. In short you get what you set out to achieve.

A bit like the average tadpole in shape really, head and eyes first, with a tapering tail of movement type activity.

Edited to remove formatting commands that appeared on the post.

[Ed P]

Richard – if you have a tiny modicum of pc and networking skill then it is quite easy to pick up the ‘understanding’ in a very practical way with a low cost DIY approach. Pan/tilt cameras (i.e. fixed focal length) are relatively cheap – <£50 in this example.  Then install Zoneminder on your Linux PC, and you have enough to learn the basics(including autotracking etc) in a very practical manner. The only potential gotcha is choosing a compatible camera link, but I cheated and just searched on pan/tilt ip camera+android to home in quickly!

Compatibility is probably the only important point to hammer home for a diy approach. Scan through the compatibility list and you will see that even for Hikvision (the ‘Apple’ of ip cameras) not all are compatible – just like Apple!

I left out the zoom bit as quite honestly it is of little use for the average home owner. (we use ours to watch the bird table and nest boxes). If you live on a farm or keep horses then it will be of value, but it is only another parameter to add to the autotracking, and not really needed to learn the basics. (main one being the best/worse places to put a camera!). Adding zoom increases the budget to ~£100 if you feel you must have it.

Btw you need the pc skill to lock down the IoT camera as cheap ones rarely have up-to-date firmware. Assuming you cannot figure out how to change the firmware you will need to put the camera in an untrusted firewalled area.

[Dave Rice]

“Hikvision (the ‘Apple’ of ip cameras)”

No, that’s Axis or Aviglion and to a lesser extent Vivotek.

[Ed P]

Even Apple doesn’t give any greater resolution than Windows. In fact Windows had usable 4K before Apple.

But Aviglion and 7K video — wow, and why would you ever need that unless you wanted to positively identify someone over 200 metres away to criminal evidence standards? I see I should have used cars as a comparison as Aviglion is more like a Ferrari or Masarati compared with Hikvision’s Posrche!

[Bob Williams]

Glad to say we in the Senior Ghetto do not appear to need cameras. We had one “prowler” last week who made the mistake of ‘prowling’ around the Close at around 1:30 am. His problem was that many of us cannot sleep well (not me) and there were several Oldphart Mafia soldiers still up. They rang each other, rang the police, advised them to leave off the bells and whistles. One unsuspecting dog walker, another village insomniac, almost ended up in the pokey. Surprising that the police took only about 5 minutes to get here though, they must have been in the area. Lincolnshire is not known for good police coverage: not their fault, manpower has been cut to the bone and it’s the second largest county, with poor roads and villages often some distance apart.

He will take another route next time he wants to walk the dog after dark, I expect. :yes:  🙂

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Dave Rice]

Yes, 30MP cameras. At 25fps that’s 240mbps bandwidth and 108GB storage per hour per camera. Going to need plenty of CPU power too. The detail is astounding (scroll down) but when would you need it?

However large MP can be useful for fisheye cameras covering large areas. Due to the nature of the lens to keep the detail up at even a relatively close distance you need the MP even when it’s dewarped. However the idea is to cover that area with 1 camera rather than many, so the resources used for a given area would be the same. The largest we’ve used is a 2464 x 1520 4MP covering a reception area and it’s 3 entrances which it does very well.

[Richard]

Ed, I agree that you can get some quite satisfactory hobby kit that might once have cost a fortune for less capability. However, since some is built down to such a low set of values your second point about security is vital. I have sometimes wondered about putting something in place to monitor the garden, just so that I can see where the dogs are when SWIMBO throws a panic attack that they are missing. I should add one parameter that you did not include in your list, the time and mental bandwidth to take on the items that you need to understand before you start. That is the one thing that is currently in very short supply for me at the moment. I certainly do not have any slabs of time to spend on fully debugging a set up. The ‘average home user’ is something between the fully clued up bod who knows what they want and need and the fully clueless who will connect any tat to anything with the right shape sockets.

[Ed P]

I do not think the mental efforts would stretch many Forumites too much, and where there are issues there are enough people with sufficient expertise to give adequate support.

That said, now that ip cameras are more or less a commodity product, privacy and security problems in the general population could well become a growing problem. The issues with their security already provide potential problems with peeping toms and celebrity stalkers.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve been looking at some cheap Zmodo cameras on Amazon . They use P2P, indeed it seems they only use P2P and you cannot access them in any other way. Some have no local storage but most do (SD card) which raises some concerns over the longevity of the cloud service, but at £40 a pop it’s not a huge risk. I’ll let you make up your own minds up video review but 720P and H264 are a nice surprise at this end of the market, as is sound as well as motion as a trigger.

At that price it’s not worth mucking about with a Pi.

[Ed P]

Actually Dave a Pi kit is 1080p and cheaper! I did not shop around – all are from Pimoroni)

Pi Zero W £9.60

Pi Noir £29 (IR camera accessory)

Total £38.60 – assumes you have a spare old 8GB SD card, otherwise add that cost.

If you want full PT action then that adds a bit

Pan-Tilt mount £30 (out of stock at the moment)

The above are all plug and play (no soldering), pretty much the same as building a PC!  The only downside for some would be the requirement to pick up a bit of Linux experience.

I’ll admit zoom is much harder to handle and needs another servo and a lot of kludging to the zoom lens you are using. link

 

[Ed P]

Two way audio just uses programs similar to those you would find on a ‘Mint’ distribution (remember the Pi fully supports a secure VNC). Mobile phone connection to a pi, just use SSH to go into the pi, if you want a call-back from the pi on motion detection just use a push notification link, and/or combine it with Raspcam remote! (app link).

I would not pretend that this is a commercial option, but it is a very viable (relatively cheap) way of a home-user learning the underlying basics of a cctv security system.

[keith with the teef]

@ openeing post.

Blimey impressive.

[Author]

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