Author: Joe Cieszynski
ISBN No: 07506 4639 X
Review date: 12/12/2025
No of pages: 215
Publisher: Newnes, Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Closed Circuit Television, by Joe Cieszynski.
Two practical books about UK CCTV are bound to be alike, but CCTV by Joe Cieszynski is covering much the same ground as CCTV Principles and Practice, by Philip Ridgeon and Mike Constant. Joe Cieszynski much like the Ridgeon and Constant book opens with an overview of the CCTV industry, that is largely but far from wholly to do with security. Then Cieszynski progresses to chapter by chapter discussions of each ingredient in the CCTV system – the signal and power transmission, light and lenses, the fundamentals of television, the camera itself, monitors, recording equipment, camera switching and multiplexing, telemetry control, and commissioning and maintenance, which is where most security managers see the engineer, tired after a strenuous installation and dusty and dirty from crawling over floors and into corners. From the start it’s made plain that this is a BSIA and SITO-based book; Cieszynski is a consultant and contributor to the SITO distance learning materials on CCTV. He writes of the BSIA: ‘Its primary role is to produce Codes of Practice, and to ensure that all registered companies comply with these Codes. The Codes themselves are devised not in isolation from the industry, but rather in consultation with it; both installing and manufacturing. In the past the Codes were written around the standards produced by the British Standards Institute (BSI), although this is now changing as Britain co-operates with her European partners in the production of common EN (Euro Norm) standards. Indeed, the current Code of Practice for the Planning, Installation and Maintenance of Closed Circuit Television Systems; No 109; Issue 2; October 1991 is soon to be replaced with a new set of EN standards …’ So those on either side of the divide in the 2000 row over the BSIA Code of Practice may well be outflanked in Europe. Remote monitoring could go international, with obvious cost savings.
Strictly technical
Cieszynski does not go into the possibilities; his is very much a technical book, providing (according to the back cover blurb) ‘the underpinning knowledge required for the level three NVQs from SITO/ CIty & Guilds’. Hence CCTV is a course book and also a reference book for practitioners. It’s written before the Human Rights Act 2000 came into force in October, and does not go into the legal details surrounding CCTV. It doesn’t set out to muse or look into a crystal ball, but one cannot help thinking that a failing of current CCTV orthodoxy as represented by Cieszynski’s book is that it is happy to stick to what it knows – fix your camera here, your monitor in this corner. That’s partly because of necessity – there aren’t the people out there who have the time and inclination to ponder the future of CCTV, on top of their long hours. The very success of CCTV – it is still a growth industry, Cieszynski says – means that many engineers have to be trained, and kept trained. Or as Cieszynski puts it at the start: ‘Within the industry there is a genuine need for engineers who truly understand the technology they are dealing with, and who have the underpinning knowledge in both CCTV and electronics principles that will enable them to learn and understand new technologies as they appear.’ Yet there’s not much in this book on the next big things – digital recording and PC-based monitoring.<br><br><strong>
One to consider
</strong><br><br>
Security managers, who are after all the ones paying for the installers and manufacturers’ products and services, might care to wonder at this: ‘Surprisingly there is very little laid down in terms of Codes of Practice for the commissioning of CCTV systems.’ He adds: ‘Handover is one of the most important stages in a CCTV installation, and yet is is too frequently glossed over as something that is only of limited importance.’ Yet it pays the installer as well as the end user to have what Cieszynski calls a ‘well-presented handover’ – because there will be less chance of site revisits. Installers instead present themselves in overalls, smelling of sweat and looking as if they do not really want to linger to deliver some training. Cieszynski writes: ‘…some companies insist that before beginning a handover the installer washes, dresses smartly and generally makes themselves presentable.’ He points out that a well-presented handover takes planning and preparation, such as walking around with the correct documents and pointing out where the cameras are for the owner. Cieszynski thinking like an end user, mentions that the installer should establish how little the new owner knows about CCTV – unless the installation is an upgrade, chances are the new end user knows very little. Reading between the lines of Cieszynski’s book end users can fathom that standards in the CCTV engineering industry are not that high – Cieszynski writes of seeing trainees replacing items of equipment at random until the problem goes away. Of course this problem is not unique to CCTV, but takes in cars, shower fittings, you name it. Fault diagnosis and site revisits, to the end user, keep the system in good repair – bearing in mind that cobwebs and defective parts can render a decent system, even one well sited, ineffective. So why are fault diagnosis and site revisits tucked away at the end of the last chapter? Maybe the trainers are too busy trying to drum the very basics into their trainees to have time for customer care. The picture Cieszynski unwittingly paints of the engineers on the ground is somewhat disturbing.<br><br>
– Closed Circuit Television, by Joe Cieszynski.
