Security Camera question

facade

It doesn't actually matter whether it works or not, as long as people can see it, so you might as well get the cheapest.

A ring doorbell is perfectly adequate to discourage distraction burglaries and doorstep scammers (but you could simply not answer the door for nothing)

Anyone upto no good is always masked, and even if their mask falls off to reveal their face, tattooed with their full name and address, The Police won't be interested*.  Any car that shows up is either stolen, or on stolen plates anyway.

Check your local facebook group or nextdoor group, they are full of footage of masked people and white BMWs on false number plates. Mine has started reporting which way the skull masked gang on trailbikes without numberplates were last seen heading, again, The Police aren't interested*.

* not strictly true. They are too under resourced to act on anything that won't individually make a headline in the National Press.

UncleZen

OTOH doorbell cameras are always placed in a position that's easy to reach, as such it's easy to disable them. Sticky tape over lens, hit with a brick and they fall off the wall or the plastic breaks, even taking the battery out is a doddle. Where's a security camera can be mounted out of reach.

a

If you buy a camera, make sure it has AI feature that recognises people, not just movement.

My camera just does movement, and trigger on windy days with paper, or leaves blowing. Clouds and the sun going in and out. Sun at the wrong angle, flooding the camera sensor. Passing cars with plashing lights like police and road works etc. Post men, bin men, meter men. Neighbors cats. Foxes. Spiders on the lens. Birds. Squirrels etc

every day had around 15 mins of false trigger, and you just end up ignoring it

If you mount a camera face height, people can easily disable it. Mount it high out of reach, and you get videos of tops of people's head, and caps block face shots.

If you rely on IR, you will get black and white picture of people that you generally won't recognise, as they often lack contrast

the best setup is PIR sensor and lighting, in conjunction with a camera, but the light must touch the area you want monitored and not shine into the camera

I bought an expensive £250 camera and 2 years later the company would no longer support it, but before that the stopped the free  cloud video saving feature.

Now, with all the non repairability, and lifelong meaning about a year, I would make my own pi camera instead and install appropriate software – but this is often out of most people's skill set even though YouTube shows you how to

Chickereeeee

I have found that mounting a separate  IR illuminator beside the camera, and turning off the camera's own IR light, improves matters greatly. You pretty much remove any false alarms due to spiders and webs, also due to rain. This is partly because you are not getting direct back-scatter into the lens, and partly because spiders are less attracted to the camera (it seems). You also get better nightime pictures, as the subject will be illuminated slightly from the side. Finally, the illuminators tend to be more powerful than those built-in to the camera.

Agree about the need for AI to recognise people, etc.