Looking out the window its raining again. Not only that but its starting to get dark its only 7 o’clock and its still August. A dank, dark and dreary day its started to get me thinking about external lighting.
Involved in the day to day running of a CCTV company it reminded me that within a couple of weeks the service calls are all going to start pouring in. Whats more they are all going to say the same thing. “Lights not working. Bulbs blown,Lights burnt out, Lights won’t work automatically” and so the list will go on. It’s a symptom of the fact that the lights that give the CCTV systems clarity at night have probably been blown out all summer but it just happens that everyone seems to notice their problems at the same time. ie at 6 o’clock mid September when they all head home and set their systems. All of a sudden they notice they can’t see where they are going. Some even realize that their cameras can’t see where they are going either and so the influx of service calls begins.
The problem of course is that most CCTV systems out there still use halogen lighting systems, generally tripped by a PIR to bring lights on only when needed. Now these lights are cheap to buy and relatively cheap to install, but do they last …NO! Its actually not even the installers fault. Try buying a decent halogen light. The home DIY market has ensured that any light costing more than £10 and no one will pay for it. Its a shame because some years ago tungsten halogen lighting was made to a high standard and lights and bulbs would last forever. Unfortunately these good manufacturers were put out of business by cheap imports.
So what is the solution? Well its here and it comes in the form of high intensity LED lighting. Raytec immediately spring to mind as the market leaders. Their lights are cleverly designed and reliable. A huge marketing campaign has ensured that Raytec are number one when it comes to CCTV and to their credit they are also branching into street lighting. Ergonomic design ensures they look good and they give fantastic results.In addition Rytec led lighting gives great light spread and reduced costs once installed. The only issue is the cost of the initial unit, however in the case of Raytec we believe you actually get what you pay for.
So back to CCTV and surely lighting is becoming less important with more sophisticated cameras, right? Well quite the opposite. Megapixel IP cameras and CMOS chips in HDCCTV cameras perform much less efficiently in the dark than analogue CCTV cameras. To this end as the marketplace swings towards HDCCTV, lighting will actually become much more important. Now we suspect that it will not be too long before the market place starts to see lots of cheap LED lighting being used. The shift to HDCCTV will demand this and we think it will be beneficial to end users as there night time images will improve as a result.
So maybe next year as more reliable led lighting starts to get installed across the UK and we start to see HDCCTV images with crystal clear clarity, we wont get quite so many service calls…………we live in hope!
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