Thinking about home security cameras.

I live in a rural area and have had no problems with theft yet, but last night my next door neighbors outbuilding was broken into and his four-wheeler stolen. I have a home alarm system, and I talked to the alarm company today about extending my system out to my shop. I'm going to have them come out and do that for me. I'm also considering installing some sort of wireless infrared camera system on the house and shop. The shop is roughly 190' from the house, so those camera's range would have to considerably exceed 200'.
Does anyone have any experience with these systems? I'd like to connect it to a desktop computer I have that doesn't get much use and have it record to the hard drive.
Thanks, Hutch

I do not have a service but was looking at the offerings from Tiger Direct last week. Thought they were priced pretty good, but not sure.
Here is a link to what they offer.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=4442

Recently bought a 16 camera set up. Every vendor I spoke with steered me away from wireless, because of the poor quality of the capture. And we have an extensive wireless syetm at the factory.

The setup is cool though. From the internet, I can log in and look at any of the cams, and two include tilt, pan, zoom, that I can also control via the internet. I also set certain cameras to only record when a range of pixels is disturbed, saving hard drive space.

Some really cool stuff out there.

I have a system I put in about 3 years ago after our first break in after being here 25 years with no security. Now I have several HD color cameras that tie into a dedicated computer that I can access any where I have web service. It cost me about $8,000 but well worth it as I put it into my 46" big screen TV that I can see from my bedroom at night. The camera's are also infra red so they also work after dark. We have had no problems since we have had them in place, with only one situation where a tenant did some damage (backed into a door and damaged it). Once confronted by the video (2 years of storage by the way) he paid for the damage without problem. I could of done it cheaper as everything came from Tiger Direct but just didn't have time to put it in with other matters to deal with. The computer and every part came from Tiger too.

Some of the more recent features are really cool. You can watch cameras from your iPhone, Your DVR (Digital Video Recorder) can e-Mail you a pic when they see motion in certain areas. most have contact closures. These can trigger an alarm system based on motion, or read a contact closure generated by the alarm system and start recording based on an alarm going off. Some will shut down recording if there is no motion to save hard drive space.

There is currently some controversy about IP cameras vs Analog cameras. IP with POE (Power over Ethernet) sure makes it easy, but the cost difference is astronomical.

Doc, there is free software to connect cameras to Linux, since you already have the servers.

I sell and install cameras as part of my business. It is a very active market right now.

This is what I see out front now.
The cameras see in the dark.
I use coax and the whole system piece parts cost about $1500.00

I bought a bunch of cameras from www.x10.com and have been very satisfied.

I also use a coax system with continues feed for 2 years before the computer starts dumping it.

I usually pull Siamese coax and use analog cameras. The Siamese has the coax and the power.

JoeC how many cameras do you have and how many FPS for each camera?

Andy said:

Doc, there is free software to connect cameras to Linux, since you already have the servers.

Click to expand...

Andy, tell me more!!! (or point me to this software, I could save a bundle going this route.)

There are several Doc. Take a look at this one. This seems to be the current "Hot One"

http://www.zoneminder.com/news.html

Here is a review of the top 5.

Hope this helps

The ub is the expense of the IP cameras over analog. There are also video boards. I have one at home, I will look to see if it has a linux driver.