Home Security Cameras with Night Vision

It is obvious that business or home security cameras are most useful at night. The darkness enables intruders to easily break into homes and business without being noticed, and a security camera without any night vision capability will be of little use during these hours unless the surveillance area is extremely well lit. However, by utilizing some type of night vision technology, intruders will have a very difficult time accomplishing their goal without being recorded and identified. The basic installation and monitoring is exactly the same as most other security cameras, but with night vision cameras you can always keep a watchful eye, day or night.

There are two most common types of technology used to record images in a dark environment. Both methods make use of the infrared spectrum, but utilize it in different ways. Infrared is basically a form of electromagnetic radiation, which has a longer wavelength than the light that is visible to the human eye. The color red has the longest wavelength of any visible color, and infrared has a wavelength that is even longer. Because infrared has a variable wavelength of 750 nm to 1mm, there is large spectrum of infrared light that can be used in different ways.

One way infrared is used is known as image enhancement. This night vision technology gathers small amounts of infrared light from the lower portion of the spectrum and amplifies it by many times. This makes the infrared light visible, thus revealing any objects or people. This is the same night vision method used on most night vision goggles, and it appears on the monitor to be a black and white type of image with a greenish tent.

Thermal imaging is another method of utilizing infrared light. Instead of amplifying the lower part of the infrared spectrum, it actually monitors the upper portion of the spectrum, which reveals something entirely different. The upper part of the infrared spectrum is produced by the emission of heat. Warmer things actually give off these higher spectrum infrared rays, and when amplified, they can reveal the human body by the heat it is putting out. The image produced from thermal imaging has a larger color spectrum, but the colors are associated with the amount of heat rather than the actual colors of the person or object. The warmer areas are recorded as “warmer colors” or yellows and reds, while colder areas show purples and blues. For this reason, sometimes the images can be more difficult to interpret.

Both of these technologies have been used for surveillance and home security cameras very successfully, providing security footage in the darkest of environments. If you have a dark area that poses some security concern consider installing a camera with night vision capabilities.

About the Author: Mike Ward is the owner and operator of Protection Depot, a leading online supplier of home security cameras and mini security cameras. For more information about security cameras, please visit Protection Depot.

Applications for Wireless Surveillance Cameras

The applications of wireless surveillance technology are extremely wide spread, translating to thousands of extremely valuable situations. These applications play themselves out in hospitals, offices, airports, banks and much more, providing security, quality control, and peace of mind for millions of people.

The most commonly perceived use of wireless surveillance cameras is security. Network cameras make it possible to be in one place, while viewing the video footage from another. Entrances, vaults, and parking lots can be closely monitored without a huge number of security employees. Not only is it much less expensive over time, but it is also much more effective. Video surveillance might catch a glimpse of someone that an actual human might not have caught, and after the fact, the footage can be played for any number of people, where as the information logged in an employee’s brain is much more difficult to extract. The beauty of wireless technology is that these cameras can also be monitored by multiple people in a control room while as well as viewed by local law enforcement, or managers who are in other locations.

This brings us to another major application of wireless surveillance, which is remote monitoring. This may have nothing to do with security, but may provide some valuable service by making video footage accessible to the public, clients, or employers. By connecting to an IP-network, wireless surveillance cameras provide real-time, high-quality video footage to any computer or network that an owner or operator chooses. For instance, perhaps a restaurant owner would like to keep an eye on their cook line or their bartenders to insure quality service for their customers. Remote monitoring makes that possible. This might also prove useful in reception areas to see who is waiting, in conference rooms, or on production lines to monitor the performance of machines or equipment.

One last overarching application for network or wireless surveillance cameras is that of website attraction. Website owners can actually show live video feeds from their network-enabled cameras, making it available for the entire world wide web. This is a very valuable tool for baiting visitors to return to your site to view this live feed in the future. This video footage might contain a university area, a mountain, a river or tide, and even a roadway. An extremely popular application of web attraction is the monitoring of traffic on roadways so that visitors can make travel adjustments.

The uses for wireless surveillance cameras will continue to increase as home security cameras, surveillance for military and law enforcement, and monitoring and security for businesses providing people everywhere with easily accessible footage that helps them make decisions, catch criminals, keep an eye on their pet, and or see someone pulling up to the drive through window.


About the Author: Mike Ward is the owner and operator of Protection Depot, a leading online supplier of wireless surveillance cameras and a variety of home security cameras. For more information about security cameras, please visit Protection Depot.

Network Surveillance Cameras

The advent of network technology has improved so many applications around the world. These include things like communication, information distribution, file sharing, and even real time video surveillance. Networks allow for people to receive and send data without being in the same room, and when it comes to video surveillance technology, network solutions have made remote video monitoring and inexpensive reality.

The first webcam went online in 1991 and was used to monitor the level of coffee in a coffee pot at Cambridge University. Since then, the development and wide spread use of network camera technology has grown dramatically. Network cameras have been the solution for security in businesses such as banks and shops, casinos, and airports. In the last five years, the security and network camera market has increased by ten times to over five hundred million dollars.

Network security cameras make it possible for people to monitor video footage from another location by connecting the cameras directly to an IP-based computer network. Access to this network can be restricted so that an authorization process is required in order to view the footage, but for some businesses it is nice to post this feed on a website or on another monitor for the public to see. This might help people keep an eye on their dogs while at the kennel or watch their kids at the daycare through a broadcast of the network provided by the kennel or daycare owner. Network data transfer also makes the installation process much simpler. If a business or home already has an existing IP-network, then the infrastructure needed is already in place. This can save individuals and businesses thousands of dollars of installation costs required to wire their structures with coaxial cabling. However, if an expensive analog system has already been wired, it is usually quite simple to connect the existing system to a network so that they can be monitored from a remote location, halfway across the world if necessary.

The basic components of a network camera are quite similar to that of an analog device, however, the built-in computing functions are provided by the use of a small computer with a dedicated IP address. This “computer” connects to the network with built-in software allowing access to the web server, ftp server, ftp client, and even email client. Many cameras also provide an input for an alarm trigger and an output as a relay feed. Though these are the basic functions of the computer located within network computers, there are also cameras that come with a variety of added features, such as motion sensors or analog video feeds, and new functions are constantly being created.


About the Author: Mike Ward is the owner and operator of Protection Depot, a leading online supplier of wireless surveillance cameras and a variety of home security cameras. For more information about security cameras, please visit Protection Depot.