Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council has added colour dome cameras to the existing CCTV system
Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council has added colour dome cameras to the existing CCTV system, as the first step in upgrading Tameside?s CCTV system to digital technology and recording as part of a ล400,000 investment in CCTV. The new Philips G3 AutoDome cameras were installed by Lancashire-based installer, Leerose Integrated Systems. Some 12 new generation AutoDome cameras have already been placed around Ashton town centre near Manchester. The new cameras bring faster panning over 360 degrees in one second, new long-life motors for reduced maintenance costs, 99 pre-set camera positions and up to three minutes of stored control sequences for more efficient surveillance. The domes also blend better into the local town centre environment, says Mike Rhodes, Principal Safety Officer for Tameside. He says: ?The old cameras took around 15 seconds to pan through 180 degrees, whereas the new AutoDomes take just one second to pan through a full 360 degrees which gives us a major improvement. This has already proved extremely useful when it comes to detecting crime. For example, operators were recently able to pass on valuable information to the police about a dozen offences relating to car theft within a short 12-hour period. These would not have been picked up using conventional slow cameras because of the time it would have taken them to pan the area. The new AutoDomes bring all the benefits of colour and the picture quality is also a thousand times better than before. This makes the recorded video far more valuable for use as evidence if required. Unlike the old cameras, the motors are also far more robust which reduces camera downtime and our maintenance costs. Another major advantage is that the new cameras look just like high quality street lights to the untrained eye and are far more discreet. The public cannot see when the cameras are pointing at them, although we do have signs to tell them that CCTV surveillance is in operation.?
