I was wondering if there is a wection on this forum pertaining to reviews or experinences with different brands of equipment..?
If not, could anyone point me to a site that does ?I had to add video surveillence to a business 5 years ago, and the research I found at the time was pointing at Panasonic Brand Surveillence equipment as being the best break even between quality and cost. We contacted a number of local companies to see what they had to offer and they WANTED to SELL us systems rated for fort knox which were way over the security budget. I ended up buying the hardware myself and installing it all. We went with PoE ( Power over Ethernet ) cameras since it was nice to just have to run Cat5 cable to locations where cameras WOULD be located, and we then just had to buy a PoE Switch to tie them into the network and power them. We ended up working out a deal with a local contractor to assist in the installation, but I did all the setup of making it all work. The Cameras were not very expensive like $300 each, but the DVR is expensive and cost us $4000!!! http://www.panasonic.com/business/psna/products-surveillance-monitoring/recorders/digital-video.aspx

For home video surveillence you probably dont need anything like what I had installed at the store, and the local security companies wanted to sell us a $15,000 solution, and in the state that it was installed New Hampshire, you can not legally record voice!, so it had features that were unnecessary.

I havent worked with the cheap home security surveillence solutions, although a friend of mine set up a USB webcam to his PC with some software which only recorded when movement was detected in the camera and caught a neighbor making himself at home in my friends garage when he was at work with a $35 webcam and some sort of software which I think was intended for captuing birds at bird feeder etc. He ended up confronting the neighbor with the local police to demand return of 1/4 of his tools that were missing and some other items that the neighbor 5 fingered on him. He was nice enough not to press charges since it soured the relationship as it was to catch the theif neighbor and on TOP of that he didnt want to have any retaliation problems if he pressed charges. I have seen systems though on Tiger Direct and Neweggs website, but I have never worked with those, and only suggestion i can say regarding those is to look at the feedback, features, and pricetag and if it sounds like a good deal maybe it is one.DaveLembke, excellent post.

Movement Video Surveillance is relatively new and really trims the cost of equipment. Here are some videos about that.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=movement+video+surveillance&qpvt=movement+video+surveillance&FORM=VDRE