Accessories

Once thought to be solely for use by banks, private detectives, or the CIA, surveillance cameras are gaining popularity for a wide range of applications. In fact, there are more than we think, because a modern hidden camera need only look like camera if its user wants it to. Many cameras also contain a built in DVR - Digital Video Recorder - so that the device need not be actively observed in real time in order to be effective. These devices typically use an SD Card for digital storage, and an 8GB SD Card is often recommended or supplied with the camera. Not everyone who needs a security camera is an electronics expert, so maybe we should stop for a minute and explain some terms in plain English. SD simply stands for Secure Digital, and GB stands for Gigabyte, which is a unit quantity of digital information storage. A gigabyte is well over a billion bytes, and that's a lot. Put in practical terms, a DVR set on low resolution with an 8GB SD Card is capable of storing continuous digital information over a period of up to six days! At the of that time, if the video actually needs to be viewed, just change out the card for another one and your camera is back in business. To view the recording on an 8GB SD Card, simply remove it from the camera/DVR and plug it into the SD card reader installed on many recent model computers. If your computer does not have a card reader, you needn't buy a new computer; add on card reader units are readily available and cost less than twenty dollars complete. It wasn't very many years ago that security cameras were wired back to VCR devices that recorded what the camera was seeing on video tape cassettes. These were the best units available at the time, but they required frequent changing of cassettes, and in more than one case, valuable evidence was lost because when the unit reached the end of the tape, it just rewound and began recording again. Those units have gone the way of the Dodo bird, the same as tape operated answering machines did. Today's gold standard in security cameras is a stand alone camera/DVR combo fitted with an 8GB SD Card.