What's out back?

Introduction

We cover a lot of the products released by Swann Security in our news feed, but don’t review many of them, usually because of the nature of the product. We don’t have warehouses or industrial premises or village halls easily at our disposal to test out some of their security products like the TruBlue 4000 series of DVRs that can record up to 8 channels of DVD quality security camera footage at once.



The OutBackCam is a different matter though. It’s a 5 megapixel camera and video recorder, mounted in a tough plastic case of just under 5 inches by 4 inches by 2 inches.

It’s battery powered (4 x AA), and easy to set up and use.

Setup and Use

Insert memory card (4Gb SD card is supplied), insert 4 x AA batteries, and then set up the options on the camera (interval of taking photos, length of videos recorded etc.) Close up the case, attach the strap (supplied) and then attach the camera to something, ready to capture some images.



I decided to strap it to my washing line pole, and monitor the comings and goings of garden wildlife. You might have more security based concerns that you’ll want to apply it to.

So I left it there for a week and then opened it up, popped the SD card into my laptop, and checked out what had happened.



There are various modes which determine how the unit captures images. I had it set on timed intervals (every 10 minutes), plus “trigger mode”, so whenever something passes nearby, it triggers the camera (the sort of thing seen in wildlife documentaries hunting for clouded leopards in remote jungles).

No clouded leopards in my garden, just the neighbours’ cats, probably a fox, a squirrel and a pigeon. An interesting study of garden comings and goings at least...

Conclusion

A neat little gadget for garden wildlife spotting, which probably has more serious uses. If you’re going to use it for security purposes (and it is easy to do so), then you’ll need to lock it down (it has a hole for a padlock to stop it being tampered with) and also protect it or make it hard to access (it would be fairly easy to smash with a hammer).

A cheap and portable way to monitor a garden, a shed, or maybe a workshop or similar.