Ipswich Borough Council, upgrading its CCTV control room, scrapped the existing VCRs because, the council reports, it required higher quality recordings of incidents for evidence purposes.
The room, dating from 1998, had its upgrade partly with a grant from the second round of the Home Office CCTV Challenge. That award was subject to a condition that recordings must be readily available to police and courts – that is, on tape, the local authority says. Jim Manning, Borough Community Safety Officer, said: ?We chose the Sanyo DTL-4800P because it provides all of the advantages of digital technology but records and stores images on S-VHS tape.? The control room monitors 80 cameras, covering shopping areas, bus stations and car parks in Ipswich town centre, and parts of Stowmarket, Hadleigh and Sudbury town centres. The installer was Waltham Abbey-based Videcom Security, who also installed Sanyo multiplexers and cameras. Visit www.sanyo.co.uk
