BACKGROUND
The residents of a 40-unit apartment coop on the Upper West Side, New York, realized that their mailroom was being confused with a men’s room several nights a month. Their board decided to install a surveillance system to monitor the area 24 hours a day, and they sought professional security advice.

As in so many other properties, their decision to install security cameras was, in the industry jargon, “event-driven”.

CHALLENGES
As in many buildings of their size, with only 40 units, when they started looking for surveillance systems, they soon found that it was easier to put the problem on the backburner and hope the annoyances will eventually go away.

The reason? The systems being offered seem to be aimed more at single-family home setups or at larger buildings with larger budgets.

The basic recommendation for the mailroom problem was to install a covert camera of some kind, together with a VCR and a monitor located in a nearby secure location. Quotes for this simple set-up run from $1,500 to $3,500.

Another problem is that the superintendent or board member has to be responsible for replacing tapes at regular intervals and checking that the tapes were still recording properly.

With a DVR machine, the images are recorded on a hard drive, there are no tapes to change, and huge amounts of data can be captured. In addition, since the system is digital, it is easier to find a specific event. But a DVR is more expensive than a VCR by several hundred dollars, and it wouldn’t eliminate the cost of linking up the camera to the recording device.

Although going wireless could greatly reduce the cost of installation, it was generally regarded as not being reliable or powerful enough to use for building-wide security systems (such equipment could be adequate for home installation, however).

For buildings that have access to high-speed internet connections, there are other solutions. However, smaller buildings are unlikely to have the infrastructure in place. While many residents may have individual high-speed internet links, there is no connection point for the building itself.

A more radical solution to eliminate the cost of cabling is to “piggyback” on the electrical wiring already in a building. But they couldn’t find a company that installs this broadband-over-power-lines equipment, that was interested in working with buildings with less than 100 units.

SOLUTION
The solution found for the mailroom problem in the 40-unit building was a unique piece of equipment that eliminated cabling and complications by putting everything together into one small, hand-sized unit called a MemoCam.

The user-friendly nature of the MemoCam stems from the fact that the whole surveillance system is built into the one small unit, with an operation that is very familiar to anyone who has used a digital camera.

Instead of transmitting images to a separate recording device, the pictures are stored on a removable memory card up to 2GB. That’s where the similarity ends, however, the device looks nothing like a camera: its invisible pinhole lens and lack of a viewing screen make it ideal for covert installations.

What transforms this camera into such an effective security-monitoring unit is its ability to link image-recording to selected events. With a combination of advanced video motion-detection and infrared heat detection, the unit can be very precisely configured.

The area being monitored can be as specific as an entranceway or a telephone on a desktop.It can be set to monitor movements in front of a window and to completely ignore any movements going on outside. The unit comes with a mounting device, a 64MB SD card and a power supply with 15ft cable. One needs only to connect it to a power supply.

When there is an event to investigate, the memory card is removed and the images can be viewed on a computer screen by usilng a card reader, which can be purchased together with the MemoCam, attached to the computer.

Someone in the building still has to be computer-savvy enough to be able to install the software and use a card reader, but it’s a procedure that has become so standard now for viewing images from digital cameras that it’s unlikely to be a stumbling block. The images, which are time- and date-stamped to clearly identify an event, can be downloaded and stored on a computer hard drive or e-mailed.

For convenience, they can also be viewed on a pocket PC, making it possible, for example, to provide the building’s super with a viewing facility without needing to set up a monitoring station.

Models that record in black and white are available for around $500 on the internet. For another $100 or so, you can add color and a new resolution technology that allows you to zoom in on a 1.2 megapixel image to see the finest detail.

For more info - go to www.vdomain.com

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