Hat Works, a museum of the hatting industry, has upgraded its internal CCTV.
The equipment was supplied by Genie’s approved local distributor, Wigan-based Fire Sound and Security. Design and installation was in-house by Stockport Council’s wholly owned company, Solutions SK Ltd. Housed in a restored Grade ll listed Victorian Mill in Stockport, Cheshire, once a hat factory, Hat Works has been developed as a Lottery-funded regeneration project and opened to the public in 2000. Offered are demonstrations of working machinery and a collection of hats. Steve Brokenbrow of Stockport Council said: “As part of a security update at the museum we wanted to replace the outdated mono CCTV cameras with vandal-resistant domes incorporating day-night cameras to dramatically improve picture quality at low light levels. Working with Fire Sound and Security we designed a flexible camera installation that offers a significant advance in performance and picture quality and now provides improved coverage that is monitored via the council’s main CCTV control centre 24-7. Ten Genie VRCD 5351 vandal resistant dome day-night cameras were installed, dramatically improving CCTV picture quality at low light.” Since low light can introduce both random and fixed noise onto video images, the cameras have Genie’s digital noise reduction (DNR) technology – available in four levels – to reduce this noise and produce a high signal to noise ratio and prevent ghost effects. As a result, enhanced levels of identification are possible in low light and, in addition, recorded file sizes are reduced by 70 per cent when using MPEG compression, the CCTV firm adds. Binit Shah, Genie CCTV’s Marketing Manager, said: ‘When Hat Works wanted to upgrade their cameras, prime requirements were for a system that incorporated the latest technology in a value for money package. Working with our local distributor we are happy to have provided a solution that met all their requirements and this is now up and running at the museum.”
