All end users want good colour images at night, to achieve this its important that a white light illuminator is your lighting solution of choice. A good white light illuminator will be able to produce around 2700 lumens in darkness, ample for good colour night time images. The best thing about led lighting though is its tough and it’s reliable. A life of 10 years or more can be achieved.
CCTV lighting has always been overlooked sometimes conveniently by sales to keep prices low, but most crime takes place at night and all cameras need light to produce an acceptable image. HD CCTV needs more light to work, street light will be insufficient for mega pixel cameras or HD SDI CCTV. Remember that good lighting will save space on your hard drive ridding your images of background interference that often increases the memory consumed on your hard drive.
CCTV lighting is becoming even more important now with the growth of HD SDI CCTV and mega pixel IP cameras. In the past CCTV lighting has been done using either IR bulbs or halogen lighting. An expensive way of doing things, with halogen an unacceptable way forward now. It pollutes and must be phased out. This opens up the path for white light illuminators in particular all in both the electrical and CCTV industry agree this the way forward if we can get the costs down.
So what do the experts say? …….. “what is the price of an illuminator compared to a halogen? Well right now price wise there is no comparison. While a 500 watt halogen can be purchased for as little as £5, an illuminator that is going to give the same sort of light spread will be well over £200 and very often more. This is hampering the change over of CCTV lighting from old to new technology. However the end user must be educated in the the TCO of an illunminator and the benefits of upgrading his CCTV lighting. While a halogen light might do you for a year without burning out , it wont last too much longer on average. Then it will draw 5 times more energy, this can be costly when having to pay the electricity bill. You must also consider access to the light for maintenance, a cherry picker these days is going to set you back at least £250 for the day so that halogen is far more expensive than you think. Finally if you are upgrading to HD SDI CCTV or a mega pixel IP camera then the extra money you have paid for quality images will be wasted as night time recordings will be disappointing
So for crisp clear colour images from your HD SDI CCTV system at night go green with a white light illuminator”