CCTV for business buying advice needed please

silverdale

VIP Member
VIP Member
Joined
Aug 2, 2007
Messages
5,413
Reaction score
7,025
A very good friend of mine owns car garage business. Last night he asked me for buying advice on a CCTV system. As far as I'm aware he has a system buy it's not up to scratch. I have a cheap system at home so I do have a general setup idea so what would be a reasonable setup ?
His requirements are:-
Minimum up to 8 camera's
Possible 1 PTZ camera
Record to cloud when motion detection kicks in

He needs to be able to view from home laptop/PC and phone and motion detection email , text etc..... It is possible to set it up to be viewed remotely on a Smart TV ? the more access from home or mobile phone the better as he lives about a mile away from his garage and it's a bit remote on an industrial estate. I'm calling up tomorrow to take a look at what he's got. The setting up and remote access I've done at home myself so that I can't see that been a problem. It's basically a favor returned to him for sorting a sh!t pit of a car I had and in record time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated , anything to stop the bad guys as I think someone recently had a pop at his garage so hence he called me , FatMan
 
To be honest I would only go with HikVision.

Very well respected camera's, and paired with their NVR he will have excellent recoding results and simple access via mobile phone/PC etc.
 
I agree with MH, a friend of mine fits CCTV and other security equipment for a living and he says currently HikVision are the way to go. Dahua and HikVision were evenly matched a few years ago but Dahua have falling back he said.

He was telling me that the new HikVision NVRs facial recognition and License plate recognition are far better than any of its competitors.

Not sure if u can get an app for the Smart TVs to monitor it but most if not all CCTV equipment use the RTSP protocol so all you will have to do is find an app for the tv that supports that protocol. If its smart tv store is anything like android there should surely be a ton of them.

In regards to the price the last time i was talking to my mate he said it all depends on the distance you want to cover and the type of camera. He had 18 mega pixel bullet HIkVision camera at his place and he showed me the picture to his drive way entrance about 30m away from the camera's mount location and it was unbelievable. I cant remember the price of that camera but i think he said it was about €200 but he is getting that at trade rates so expect to pay more.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for that I will pass all this on to him it's up to him. He just texted me saying at the moment he has a RAVEN H264 I'm not sure if their actually any good as I'm not up with CCTV quality or if thwe NVR's OK but with better camera's, or simple scrap it start again.

I think the other sticky part is the NVR and were it goes in the garage so it doesn't get robbed in a robbery so to speak. Recording to a cloud would be his best option so he's a temp permanent copy of any footage , well that what I think lol
 
as far as i know the hikvision NVR can upload to cloud services when an event is triggered. There is also a tone of software you can get to do this, if you plan on recording to a PC or server.

I have a few dahua cameras and i have them configured to send me a video every time motion is detected. The dahua cameras I have don't have the ability to upload to the cloud so that's why i get them to send me a video. In the event they steal the server that stores the CCTV recording, i will still have footage of the break in. The only downside in this is that my gmail account gets full on a regular basis.
 
Could you possibly point me in the right direction to any hikvision and decent camera deals. Sorry for the spoon fed questions but theres that many about im not sure what's old stock and whats new , thank you
 
Hikvision or Dahua DVR/NVR will do the job. I would go for 5mp minimum camera that are wired over cat6 which will will be give you the option to go full ip camera later and also control ptz cameras.

In terms of viewing these use RTSP and I currently use tinycam pro app on my Amazon Fire TV to view cameras.

Not sure about the cloud storage part tbf.

Check sites like cctv central for prices etc



Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
 
I am using my Synology NAS as my NVR, but will be upgrading to a HikVision NVR in the coming months and adding in a couple of camera's.
Probably go for a 5mp for the front and move my 3mp to the back.

Hikvision Europe

DS-2CD2355FWD-I

Interesting about the license plate and facial recognition [emoji106]
 
Last edited:
No point in buying all 5mega pixel cameras if you dont need them.

best thing to do before buying is go to your mates place and assess the area. see what areas he needs covered
  1. does he need to be able to pick up car regs and faces?
  2. what distance will the cameras need to cover?
  3. is the area lit at night?
  4. find out his budget?
  5. is it better for him to have all areas covered with cheaper cams that suit his budget or better to buy a few more expensive cams and add cams to less vital areas later?
im no expert in CCTV i just know a little from what my mate has told me and from what i found online. i know WOS have a few good kits but not sure what there prices are like compared to other sites
 
Thanks,
I called earlier and to be fair on first impressions the Raven standalone h264 is not that bad but the camera's he has are. His works is about 15m-20m from the only real access, the main metal gate so he wants at least one very good camera possibly a PTZ he can operate from a remote access which I managed to do so any buying advise on that would be great. It would be mounted about 15ft up on a steel girder frame of the building.

He would like to be able to read reg plates and faces coming in from this gate because the camera he has at the moment is a bit sh8t and the reg's are blurred as hell at about 7-8m. I suppose he could use this elsewhere but for distance, na. All in all the rest will be scattered closely around the workshop and in the office area.

I think a few half decent camera's would be all he needs and one dogs bollcocks one the PTZ. I said get to him, get some good camera's set up , see how it does and if the standalone is crap get another in the future say a HIKVSION as a few mentioned.

So , on that, I'd say start with 4-5 cameras so any buying advice would be really handy as I'm not up on which to buy, night vision, decent pixel and one PTZ that;s half decent
thanks again
 
It's years since I did anything with CCTV and the technology has certainly moved on. But one thing remains the same, and that's lens tech. The camera he wants to record faces, reg's etc. would ideally have two cameras in one unit; a colour and a mono one. This works because lenses need to have different properties for daytime light and IR (night). These 'twin' cameras switch over to the mono one when the IR illuminators come on and images remain sharp. Normal single day/night cameras have to compromise and either daytime or IR-illuminated scenes will be slightly blurred.
I have had one experience with Hikvision; I bought a DVR from a car boot sale for €5. Worth it for the 1TB drive alone! The DVR didn't work, but an email to Hikvision was replied to very swiftly along with a firmware update which got it going again. Well impressed!
 
I'm looking at Hikvision cameras too but take care on the lens angles as some suppliers don't give a choice!

You need to work out field of view from camera mounting positions.
 
Any advice on which camera's and were to buy,Its a minefield out there.

One PTZ and a static would probably, I don't know which to advise him to buy. The 2 cameras he has both use BNC cabling
 
I called this morning to try and get it working over the net and tbh , I gave up. I port forwarded the web port and it's not having any of it.

He's decided to buy a new system so if anyone can drop a link on a system that would be great. Is POE the better option as well ?. 8 channel and 4mb camera's
 
what you trying to port forward, was it the cameras or the NVR?

depending on the router you may have to add an access control list

Id dedfnilty go with POE cameras as you only need 1 cable and most of the IP cameras dont rely on NVRs you can use just record to a NAS, PC server etc.
 
He wants to be able to remotely view (as it stands) the two existing cameras at home and on his phone.

I have a cheap CCTV set up with 4 bullet cameras. In my box set up I have 3g-4g mobile phone set up and the "mobile port" set as 100. I also set port forward to 100 in the router.
So when I enter my home IP + user/password into Meye android app up pops all 4 cameras when im out and about.
Because he lives a mile or so away he desperately needs this mobile and home access and all the cameras with possibly motion detection either text or email.
The Raven already has this and seems half decent so I was thinking of telling him just get some cameras but I cant get it to work over the net.

If he were to go down the POE do you use,standard RJ45 cabling ?, and, do you know any say 8 channel deals POE with min 4 cameras or 8. Would prefer 4mb dome cameras if possible
 
If he were to go down the POE do you use,standard RJ45 cabling ?, and, do you know any say 8 channel deals POE with min 4 cameras or 8. Would prefer 4mb dome cameras if possible

standard RJ45 but i would go at least cat 5e just to future proof it a little, so down the line if he upgrades to 4k cams he wont have to upgrade the cabling.

I wouldnt be able to recommend a system, best peice of advice i would give you is go to a CCTV forum and ask there.

try another app other than the MaxxOne CCTV one since you dont have the QR or better again see if you can find someone with the QR code on a CCTV forum.

another thing use DHCP until you are able to achieve a connection then switch over to static. That way you can rule out an IP input issue
 
I think that's were I might be going wrong with the DHCP. I've set it as a static but it's not having it. I have opened and allowed the 3 ports in the pic

18004
9000
80
It's a BT hub 5 so you select a game. I selected the box MAC address if you get my drift. I'm gonna go back up shortly and try it hands on
 
Back
Top