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Bling CCTV

As any movie fan would know, the idea of knocking off a bank or jewellery store makes for a great plot.

In order to prevent any real-life action movies from occurring, Denmark’s House of Amber decided to upgrade its existing CCTV system at the hybrid museum-flagship store in Copenhagen. As one of the city’s main tourist attractions, this was done to ensure the security of both products and customers; as well as to continue the brand’s reputation as a world leader in Amber jewellery since 1933.

Continuing the global security trend of focusing on future-proofing, Danish system integrator Dynateam A/S, along with the Danish distributer ALSO Actebis A/S, collaborated to provide House of Amber’s unique facility a solution that simultaneously upgraded, maintained, and future-proofed an already-existing CCTV system.

Obviously, the issue of IP was paramount – but primarily in a future-proofing sense. While a percentage of IP cameras are currently used, it was deemed cost prohibitive to make a wholesale switch from analogue at this time.

However, one such IP camera was seen to be too valuable to wait for: Hikvision’s DS-2CD852MF-E 2.0 megapixel network camera, boasting features such as H.264/MPEG4 dual stream video compression, high-resolution video preview (1600x1200 pixels), SDHC card for local storage, motion detection and PC client notification.

Jens Ole Nielsen, senior consultant at Dynateam, said, “PoE (Power over Ethernet) makes installing the camera much easier, since we only need one outlet. The vari-focal lens is also important. Many comparable cameras only offer a fixed lens; but with the DS-2CD852MF-E 2.0’s adjustable focal lens, our customers can vary between a high millimetre optical zoom for close-ups, and a varifocal lens for further images.”

For House of Amber, this varifocal feature was especially important since store security wanted the ability for wide-angle pictures above 90-degrees of the image, as well as the ability for high-resolution close-up images … all without pixilation.

Nielsen related, “In regards to this specific camera, and this specific market and price range, there are no other competitors that can offer the quality and technological innovation that Hikvision does. Additionally, the support from Hikvision distributor ALSO Actebis has been great. This is in terms of recommending the right solution, and doing so with great flexibility.”

Since it was not feasible to replace every existing analogue camera with an IP counterpart, a decision was made to convert existing analogue into IP signals within the Milestone video management software (VMS). Nielsen noted, “Hikvision products are fully compatible with Milestone, and that is why we chose its ds-6104hci-ip digital video server to accomplish this goal. In fact, for CCTV solutions such as this, we almost always combine the DS-6104HCI-IP with Milestone.”

Additionally, the issue of future proofing was also addressed with this Hikvision model: “The scalability of this solution was very important. If House of Amber later wants additional sensors or alarms, they can use I/O ports for the integration of these applications.”

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