Basic, cheap CCTV camera

[watercooled]

A friend of mine has been having some problems with a neighbour borderline harassing him. Long story but he's after a camera he can mount in a window above his front door to catch anyone by his front door.

We tried a cheap battery powered, SD card one from Amazon but it's not brilliant e.g. the motion sensitive record option is a bit rubbish and only seems to start recording some time after the motion event which makes it a bit pointless.

Ideally it should be as simple as possible to install and use, and I don't imagine he'll pay a lot hence trying the cheap one from Amazon. Open to all ideas though!

Thanks!!

[peterb]

Well, you get what you pay for, and anything with half decent capability is going to cost. A car dash cam might be the solution, prolivided her can retrieve the sad card after an event and the area under surveillance is illuminated

He needs to ensure that the camera only captures people on his propert (not passers by ) and he may need to put up a war I g notice. The warning notice itself might be sufficient deterrence.

If he is looking for something that will provide evidential material, then he’ll need deep pockets for high definition, time code generators and the like.

[watercooled]

Aware of all of the above, it's a complicated situation, just wondering if anyone has any recommendations or novel ideas. The area captured would be no more than something like one of those fancy doorbells (something I've also considered).

The dashcam is an interesting idea, though I suspect 24/7 recording would burn through SD cards fairly quickly, hence trying one claiming to have motion activation. The cheapy *would* be basically ideal if the motion activation actually worked properly. It even has IR illuminators for night vision!

[peterb]

Dash cams typically record short periods of material (initially to ram - which then gets dumped to SD card periodically - typically 5 minutes. When the card is full the oldest files are then over-written, hence my comment about retrieving the card periodically, or after an ‘incident’ has taken place.