Review of the Serage SRPNF12 fish eye camera

We have finally got our hands on the Serage’s fish eye camera and it’s a very, very exciting piece of kit.

To give it its full name it’s the Serage SRPNF12MP Fisheye camera, part of Serage’s new premium range of cameras The first thing out of the box is the drill template, a self adhesive guide to the fixing points, so you pop it on the wall or the ceiling, and it helps you drill the holes in the correct place. There’s also a quick start guide and then it’s the camera itself.

Also in the box you get some grommets, you get your fixings and the mounting bracket.

There are a number of cables coming out of the rear of the camera. The first is the data connector to take the data back to the recorder, it’s also Poe enabled (that’s Power Over Ethernet, for the uninitiated, so you don’t need a separate power supply for this camera as long as your recorder will output Power over Ethernet. If you don’t have that, then there’s a standard 12 Volt DC jack socket and there is also the alarm output connectors.

It is a fairly standard looking camera, quite narrow, but it’s packed full of gizmos. You’ve got some LEDs in there for night vision, with a range of 10 metres. That seems relatively short for a modern camera, with 25 or 30 metres being not uncommon. We need to bear in mind that a fish eye camera isn’t designed for monitoring long distances, it’s designed to monitor a relatively small space, and all its power is in its close-up vision.

You’ve also got both a microphone and a speaker so you can have two way conversation with someone that’s within field of view of the camera. The alarm outputs can be used to trigger something, for instance, an alarm siren. When it sees movement at a time when it shouldn’t do, you can set it up to trigger a siren. In all fairness, it looks very much like any other fish eye camera, but it’s once you get underneath the hood and into the back end that the real beauty of comes out.

Now if you know a normal fish eye camera, you would have seen that these give a 360° view of the room that they’re monitoring. This one’s quite clever. It can digitally modify the signal of the vision that it sees and dewarp it and give you a number of different views. So whilst you can have your standard 360° view, it can give you a cylinder view, which, instead of the normal disc view, it will give you kind of a walk around view of the room. It’s really difficult to describe in words what it looks like.

It will also give you a 180° view, again it’s quite a warped view, necessarily, and the really good thing is that if you mount this in the middle of the room it will give you 2 separate 180° views, one of each side of the room.

And then it can also give you the standard 360° view with 1, 3, 6 or 8 dewarped views showing various different angles in the room. The beauty with all of those is that they’re all electronically pan, tilt, zoom. By selecting the camera view with your mouse, you can the drag the view to pan and tilt, and use the scrollwheel to zoom into and out of the image.

They’ve clearly put a lot of thought and effort into the really clever electronics underneath this.

Where would you use? I reckon you would use this in shops, trade counters, restaurants, anywhere where you might potentially have dead spots. You can use this where you might have a room that might have two or three cameras in it, you can use just this one and it gives you these 8 different views, to minimise the areas that you can’t see – in other words have 1 camera where you might have needed 2, 3 or even 4.

All in all, this is a really clever piece of kit, and one that we’re really excited to be able to go forward with.

If this has whetted your appetite for CCTV for your property, whether it’s at home or at work, head on over to our CCTV page for more information, and then send us a message with the form at the bottom.