Only your leasing agreement and/or building manager can tell you for sure, but it’s safe to assume they’d frown on it.
Something to consider. This WOOT Deal offers only 3.6mm cameras whereas the DEALS.WOOT offers 3.6mm or 6mm, and gives you a much different view. I recommend doing some research before purchasing.
I have tried several of these from Costco. Ultimately they all go back. The quality is too low to be useful in catching anyone who isnt known to you, much less admissible in court. If lighting is not perfect you will just get black shadows or blown out white. $1000 seems to be the entry level for something useful, though I have seen some iPhone apps that work with iSight cams to do a decent job for $5-$50.
e.g.
http://www.godigit.info/2011/04/imac-witness-transforms-isight-camera-of-monitoring/
Oh. The other big problem with cheap Chinese CCTV surveillance is the motion detection. It’s ridiculous. It goes off on a breeze through the trees or just the sunlight. But totally ignores the guy stealing the bike off the porch!!
I vote for the Mossberg. A friend has one. Loves the thing, keeps it beside his front door. The (was going to be) upscale housing development he lives in about 10 miles outside Tucson went broke when the economy crashed, with only a few of the units fully finished and it’s now a squatter’s paradise, with dopers and hookers running their businesses out of nearby trashed homes. He hears gunshots during the night and figures it’s only a matter of time 'til someone gets curious about his place. Then… boom.
I emailed him to tell him about today’s Woot. It certainly can’t hurt to be able to see outside when you’re the only good guy for miles around.
It’ll come in so handy for the zompocalypse, too.
go with the Mossberg, physical evidence trumps a video everytime. But it would be cool to have that on video. . .
So what kind of surface do I need to attach these to to keep someone with a portal gun from knocking them off the wall?
Let’s say I buy these to prevent people breaking in my house and stealing stuff.
- The thief can steal the DVR unit itself. Any way these can stream to an offsite storage system?
- Assuming I captured video of the thief, how well does the video hold up in court? Does this imprint a timestamp, or have any measures to prevent alteration of video or identify when video might have been altered? (Things I imagine a defense attorney might use to counter the evidential weight of the video.)
Paint it dark. Portal guns work on all white surfaces!
I’ve used this in a retail setting. First and foremost, if you plan on using it to discourage more than petty shoplifting, it’s not going to be effective. It honestly worked better for employee management than preventing loss.
Because, let’s be honest, if you have a video of your nice stuff going into a bag of a shopper and out your door two hours ago, and you don’t have the person there, nothing is going to happen if you call the police in. They’re pretty much going to say ‘yep, nice video of your stuff being stolen.’
But it also gives you the opportunity to know where your employees were during that theft, and you can use that knowledge to reposition staff, or train them how to handle the distractions that enabled the theft in the first place.
And of course, remember to put a camera on the registers and the office where the system is located.
Video quality is good; problems we encountered is that the video takes time to adapt to light changes - a sudden flash can blind the camera. The ‘alarm mode’ is actually rather effective and in a low traffic retail setting, you can simply leave it on alarm mode to switch the video automatically to where the ‘action’ is, IE movement in the store.
You can download video files as well, but honestly, not super effective or brilliant quality. In a home security type setting an audio alarm system is far more effective, as well as motion sensor lights. But if you’re frequently away, and have concerns about your property, this is a great investment in peace of mind for making sure everything’s ok at home.
Limitations for internet viewing is one user at a time, and you can use it in a local network to effectively create a second viewing station. And getting it to play well with your router isn’t exactly easy. Internet Explorer users will have to use compatibility mode (I think the app was written for IE6) but it will work in that mode with the most recent versions of IE.
All the ones I have tried can imprint timestamp on the video. These cheap systems are really only good enough to let you see that, yes, SmartPost did drop off my package 2weeks late, and then someone wearing what looks like it might be a hat took it, squatted for about two minutes, and left… So THAT’S where that strange poop came from!!
The one on sellout.woot.com has an option for the black cameras, which are actually materially different. The silver ones all have 3.6mm lenses, whereas the black ones have 6mm lenses.
Typically, the shorter the focal length, the wider angle the lens. However I’m not sure these focal lengths correspond to viewing angle in the world of security cameras. Because a 6mm lens in the SLR world is pretty much half a sphere:
http://www.nikonchat.com/wp-content/uploads/fisheye%20nikkor%206mm.jpg
[EDIT: The 3.6mm lens provides a 53 degree field of view, while the 6mm lens zooms at 33 degrees.]
Wow. Sounds like my kind of neighborhood! any idea how many square feet the homes are and how much they are going for?
[QUOTE=ElanorRigby, post:13, topic:320792]
I’m tempted to buy this just to find out what my cats do outside all day to wear themselves out. They always show up in the evening, strewn about on my back porch, bonelessly posed like there has been a particularly violent mass murder of adorable cats. Then they wake up.
[/quote]
heh…I was just wondering the same thing about my cat - he does pretty much exactly the same thing - with added intermittent appearances to gorge himself on catfood. The strangest part about it is he actually seems to lose weight, even though he eats like 70% of his body-weight heh…
The only key difference is, I was planning on strapping the camera to my cat 
Anyone know if I can use this with a 16-channel Multiplexer? The Multiplexer can handle 16 cameras, but it doesn’t have the DVR function. Can I plug the output of the Multiplexer into one of the camera inputs and record the video output stream of the Mux on the DVR?
Is this the same system, or different?
http://www.amazon.com/ZMODO-Surveillance-Outdoor-Camera-System/dp/B004Y3VKYO
An excellent choice for what I believe is the rent/crack house down the street. It does seem like a decent deal, but this ones not for me.
Woot haiku:
Eight camera box
Catch burglar in the act
If box not stolen
If someone kicks in his front door in the middle of the night they’ll automatically be standing between your friend and his Mossberg. If he doesn’t move it to the bedroom he’s gonnna be the one getting “boomed” on.
This has CMOS cameras. If I remember correctly from when I researched these a few years ago(before purchasing 3 systems from Costco), The CCD cameras produce a better picture.
Nope. Try this link to the same model.
http://www.zmodo.com/8-channel-h-264-real-time-surveillance-security-dvr-6.html
Only if they know about it. Patch what need patching when you leave. No harm; no foul.