Went to a promising appointment today. It was a school in the Midlands who were suffering problems with vandalism and they wanted to stop it. Their first thoughts turned to cameras and that if they could identify the hoodlums then they could bring them to the attention of the authorities and put a stop to it once and for. The damage caused to date was around £8500 and it was inevitable that there would be a repeat performance sooner rather than later.
We looked at the place where the problems were occurring , this was in a poorly lit section of the school and it was apparent that the area would need a couple of white light illuminators. In addition we wanted to supply an HD CCTV solution rather than analogue. After all they wanted to ID these crooks not just capture blurred images of an event that would provide no detail post vandalism.
We made the customer aware of his options, 4 analogue cameras or a 2 mega-pixel IP camera plus some LED lighting. The mega-pixel solution meant that they could expand at a later date into other areas of the school but the recording solution was more expensive than a 4 way analogue DVR to start with.
Confronted with costs the customer immediately decided that he wanted analogue, but he did not want 4 cameras just 2 after all surely if they knew the people causing the issues (they assumed it was their own pupils) then the video evidence would be ok. Again we tried to explain why in our opinion this was a short sighted non solution to his issues. Even with a Dem of HD which he was most impressed with did he insist he still knew better and wanted to keep with his idea of an analogue solution convinced it would work.
We would rather walk away, so another wasted day, another customer about to be disappointed with his cameras , another customer who will try to blame his supplier that the cameras are very poor and don’t do the job, another customer who will always rue his purchase and tell all his colleagues how useless CCTV is when they really need it…..oh and another customer who refused to listen and made price a more important point than the CCTV solution itself…………the list goes on………..