These Cameras are
usually very specialised, built for the security industry
and have not until now been either of the quality needed or
generally available at a reasonable price to be useful for
Paranormal groups usage.
The USB2 versions of these sorts of cameras are excellent,
but USB2 is very limited in range from the length of cable
standpoint, typically 9 metres maximum. The usual way around
this is to change the USB2 into Ethernet using a special
cable extender allowing USB over CAT5 and back to USB2 at
the other end. Using this method the cable can be up to 100
Metres long.
The alternative and for our purposes safer method is to use
a 2.4 GHz transmitter attached to each camera followed by a
2.4 GHz receiver at the other end. Using this method you are
looking at around £199 per camera. The drawback is that you
will also need a digital recording card in your PC or Laptop
with multiple inputs and these can set you back at least
another £300 alone.
The advantage of radio is obvious, but there are
limitations in that available RF Transceiver units can only
use channels 1 through to 4 limiting. This limits you to
just 4 cameras on site at once, in practice though its
unusual for more than three to work properly due to
frequency drift.
Our Swann units shown above, we have four currently, can
use CAT 5 (LAN) cable or can be connected to a bog standard
wireless router via CAT 5 (LAN Cable) as shown, or to a
wireless access point.
Both the router and the access point use 2.4 GHz, but these
devices can use all 13 available channels. This gives you
either 13 Swan type cameras (if you have the money they are
£80 each) or you can use your existing 4 cameras and
Transceivers alongside 9 Swann units.
As we said earlier you can use CAT 5 with these cameras
which means they work where normal radio cameras cannot, up
to 100 Metres from your Laptop. Even further if you add one
or more Hub's, switches or LAN extenders, an extra 100
Metres per unit.
Now because these Cameras use LAN you can also direct the
cameras output to a SAN (Storage Array Network), these are
now widely available at around £120 and can currently
provide 500 GBytes storage located anywhere on your LAN. We
have yet to establish the volume that one Laptop and one SAN
can cope with, but theory suggests that this should be at
least 3 cameras simultaneously, unmodified.
The Swan units are really good, they incorporate 6 bright IR
LED's with automatic NV switchover when the lighting level
drops. This means that you can set the unit up and focus it
in normal light and when the lights go out instant Night
Vision. The cameras are full colour units with built in
microphone, making them very flexible. With a laptop
connected to your LAN you can control every aspect of the
camera remotely even zooming in to a part of the picture or
taking still shots.
The output format is a bog standard Windows Media file or
should I say files. Windows Media is limited to 2 GBytes in
size and at 10 FPS (Frames per Second), the camera can
manage 15 FPS, will use up around 12 GBytes in an hour. It
depends on how much is moving in the image it could be a bit
less or up to twice that quoted. The manufacturers have
catered for the obvious problem and when the first file is
nearly full the camera starts a new one automatically. Our
tests show that there are no lost frames.
The cameras NV capabilities are better than most off the
shelf NV video cameras, the benefit of design for security
use. Using the default settings we were easily able to get
out to 7 Metres indoors. We will be testing these units in
anger at an investigation shortly after which we will update
the usable NV range data.
These cameras are built to be used inside or out, although I
personally doubt their abilities unprotected in rain, but
that's nit picking where our usage is concerned. My only
other gripe is that focusing these cameras is a tricky
business, best carried out in normal light with the camera
monitored directly using an attached laptop.
Network set up is via a web page for each camera, a little
knowledge of LAN networking is very desirable to set these
up initially. This is not a problem for me I am an IT
professional, but this may present a problem to the IT
challenged. Once done though you will not need to change the
network settings again.
While not the main reason for
purchasing these units, they also have a normal A/V out
capability. This provides the ability for them to be used
with a second DVR recorder whenever we need to use more
recording devices over a particularly large site
