Vigilance is important
Gianna Madrini
Ellum from car break-ins, copper thefts and more recently
a home break-in where a person was accosted in their own home and
robbed of their wallet. The suspect gained entry by
accidently being buzzed into the building and simply knocking on the
victims door. Please be extremely watchful when entering
or exiting your building.
I would like to recommend that if you see anyone hanging around your
building or continually cruising back and forth near parked cars
in a lot or on the street that you take a photograph of them. This
may serve as a deterrent and could also be helpful in identifying
criminals
who are staking out their next robbery. In my case, I used it to
identify a guy who came back again and again and was illegally
parking cars
in a parking lot next to my office. I recognized him from a
previous photograph I had taken of him. Please note, he was not
homeless, just a
dumb criminal. Dumb criminals tend to make the same mistake over and
over again.
Consider investing in a security system and or surveillance cameras
which are very affordable and worth every penny. They could save you
some anguish down the road. A camera surveillance system we
installed on our property has been extremely helpful in thwarting
criminals
because we can observe individuals and suspicious activity as it's
happening and alert the police if they pose a problem. This has come in
handy on many occasions.
Vigilance is important and reporting a crime or other problem when it
occurs is equally as important to improve the security of
Deep Ellum.
Gianna Madrini
President
Deep Ellum Association
Sam Crutsinger
wrote:
> There has been a rise in theft incidents these past few weeks in Deep
> Ellum from car break-ins, copper thefts and more recently
> a home break-in
That's just called "Springtime." Once the weather gets up to about 100°F the
crime will taper off. After 10 years of living down here with no protected
parking, you start to notice correlations like that. =\
--
Sam Crutsinger
Media Kingpin / CTO
Confidence Bay
http://www.confidencebay.com/
Edit in confidence... Anywhere.
spiral glass
On 4/24/07 11:02 PM, "Gianna Madrini"
Sam Crutsinger
> sam, how much to get a sim. system with 4 exterior, and two interior cameras?
[penalty for top posting. Please trim away extraneous quoted text and reply
below the quote so emails read from top to bottom. Thank you.]
If you want to record the video feeds, then that's where it gets pretty
pricey. Just running 6 feeds to a couple of monitors would be relatively
cheap but unless someone is looking at the screen at the time, that setup
isn't really worth much.
I'll assume you're wanting to record.
One thing to keep in mind is that black & white cameras have MUCH more
detail than color cameras when it comes to shooting at night. You can get
really nice B/W cameras with IR night emitters to light up the area in front
of the camera for about $120 each if you're buying them by themselves.
Inside, I'd go for color cameras. There you have more control over lighting
the area you want to cover.
I would go with wired cameras and run the cables instead of wireless. The
wireless ones usually have cheaper sensors and they're prone to interference
from everything from cordless phones to microwaves.
My recording system is on a Macintosh based computer. I'm a Mac guy so if
you have a spare Mac laying around, the software to make that into a
recorder for up to 8 cameras is $250.
If you're on a PC I don't know what programs are good, but I know they're
out there. If you just want a turnkey box, then about $2400 will get you
everything. http://surveillance-video.stores.yahoo.net/nualldico8ca.html I
don't know anything about that system. I just picked it out of Google as a 6
camera setup.
If you want to record audio like I do, then you need to have cameras with
mics built into them. This doesn't add too much to the price, but it does
allow me to trigger recording on sounds, like my car alarm, as well as on
motion.
How far away are you looking to have the cameras from what you want to
record. If it's 6' then that's easy to light up with the little ring of
lights on most cameras these days. If you want to capture people 50' away,
then you might need to add some infrared lights to light up the area better.
It's invisible to the naked eye, but the camera sees it like a car headlamp.
This one has 132 LEDs which is like a hell of a lot:
<http://www.security-cameras-cctv.com/infrared-illuminator-with-leds-p-1539.
html> It's $155, but you can find smaller ones for quite a bit less. This
one says it covers up to 220 feet so I'd call that a pretty good one I'd
like to try out cuz it should look like a frikkin laser flashlight at the
25' or so that I'm wanting to light up in front of my loft.
So how much it would cost depends on what features you want for the system
and if you want to use some spare parts you have sitting around. There's
kits I've seen out there that drop into an old PC to record feeds. No idea
how well they work, but I'd estimate that about $2000 would get you a really
useful setup.
Hell, I may have to take on a side job building security systems. =)