Security Camera Shop in Birmingham
In our showroom you can watch the camera you are considering as it records you, live, on a monitor a metre from your face. That is the difference between buying CCTV in Birmingham and buying it off a photograph on a website. We are at Unit 60, Camp Hill Industrial Estate, John Kempe Way, Birmingham, B12 0HU, open Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 17:00.
CCTV101 is the trading name of Cerrado Ltd (company number 06685310). We have been selling security cameras out of Birmingham since 2008. Some of the people at the counter are installers with a van outside and a job on that afternoon. Plenty more are buying one system for one house and want to get it right first time. Same counter either way.
Come and see it working before you commit
Our demonstration showroom has cameras live on screens rather than boxed on a shelf. Two things are worth looking at with your own eyes, because neither of them reads properly off a spec sheet.
Night performance is the big one. A standard camera with infrared gives you a black-and-white picture after dark. A full-colour camera, such as Hikvision ColorVu or the Dahua Full-colour equivalent, holds colour through the night using a wider aperture lens and a small white light. Colour matters enormously when you are describing a jacket or a car to the police. It also costs more. That does not make it the automatic answer, because a white light pointed anywhere near a neighbour’s bedroom window buys you a different sort of problem entirely, and we have talked people out of one on those grounds more than once. Seeing the two run side by side settles the argument in about thirty seconds. We have written the comparison up in ColorVu against Dahua Full-colour if you would rather read first.
Lens coverage is the other. A 2.8mm lens sees wide and close, while a 4mm sees narrower and further. On paper that difference means nothing whatsoever. Watch how much of a room each one takes in and it becomes obvious. It also stops you buying four wide-angle cameras and then discovering you cannot read a number plate on any of them.
What to think about before you buy
Nobody needs the whole catalogue. Four decisions do most of the work here, and getting them wrong is what brings people back to the counter two months later looking sheepish.
Decide what each camera is looking at
Most people walk in asking for four cameras. Better to walk the outside of the house first and work out what every view is actually for. Put one over the front door, low enough to catch a face rather than the top of a hood. The driveway wants a camera at an angle, so you get the side of a vehicle instead of a distant bonnet. Round the back, a corner mount usually picks up two elevations at once. Add a fourth where there is a side gate or a detached garage that nobody overlooks. Four views doing real work will beat six pointed hopefully at a lawn.
4MP is the sensible middle
4MP cameras are where most home systems sit now. They give you enough detail to identify someone at ten metres without eating storage for breakfast. 8MP earns its money on a long driveway or a wide frontage, where you need to crop into the recording afterwards and still read something. Above that you are mostly paying for a bigger number on the box. Nothing more. Ask at the counter and we will put the same scene up on a screen at both resolutions, which is a quicker way to settle it than reading two datasheets.
Where the recorder lives
An NVR is a small box with a hard drive in it, and it wants somewhere sensible to sit. Not by the front door. Whoever walks out with your television will take the recording of himself along with it, which is the oldest own goal in this trade. A cupboard is fine. So is a loft, or the space under the stairs, ideally near the router if you want the cameras on your phone. Channel count should leave you room. Buy a 4-channel only if you are certain about four cameras, and an 8-channel if there is any chance at all of adding one later. Our guide to NVR sizing works through drive capacity against recording days, or tell us how long you want to keep footage and we will do the sum on the counter.
Cable is not the place to save twenty pounds
Nearly every fault carried back to this counter turns out to be a cable fault. Not a camera fault. Copper-clad aluminium is cheap, and it behaves beautifully on a bench, then fails to push power down forty metres of cold loft in January. Buy solid copper CCTV cable, and buy more of it than you measured. Run the whole lot loose before you clip anything to a wall.
What a home system actually costs
Guide figures below cover equipment only, based on what people typically walk out with. Installation is not included. Prices move with brand and with what is on the shelf that week, so check the camera pages or ring 0121 655 0146 for today’s number.
| Setup | Typical contents | Guide price |
|---|---|---|
| Two cameras, small house or flat | 4-channel NVR with a 1TB drive, two 4MP turret cameras, cable, connectors | £250 to £400 |
| Four cameras, standard family home | 4-channel NVR with 2TB, four 4MP cameras with one full-colour on the front, cable, PSU | £400 to £750 |
| Six to eight cameras, larger property | 8-channel NVR with 4TB, a mix of 4MP and 8MP cameras, one of them with a spotlight and siren | £750 to £1,400 |
Buying as a CCTV kit usually comes in cheaper than assembling the same parts one at a time, and the recorder and the cameras are already known to work together. If the kits do not cover what you are after, we will build the equivalent out of single cameras and recorders instead.
What we sell
Around 890 lines in total. CCTV is most of that, with intruder alarm and networking kit filling out the rest. The brands are Hikvision, Dahua, Uniview, HiLook, SPRO, Pyronix, Haydon, Securenet, TP-Link, plus our own CCTV101 range. Pyronix is there for anyone who wants intruder alarms running alongside the cameras. The networking range covers the switches and injectors that keep a system talking to the router when the recorder ends up at the far end of the house.
We sell singles as happily as systems. One camera, one recorder, a box of cable, a handful of connectors, whatever it is that has gone missing. That is usually the job when somebody is extending a system that already exists or replacing one dead camera. Bring the old camera in with you, or at least a photograph of the label on the back of it, and we will match it rather than guess.
Getting here, and getting it home
Camp Hill Industrial Estate sits just south-east of the city centre, in the Sparkbrook & Balsall Heath East ward, a short hop off the A4540 Middleway. Aim for Camp Hill Circus. Come off there and you are nearly on top of us, and it is an easy run in from either the Stratford Road or the Coventry Road. Off the M6, leave at Junction 6 and follow the Aston Expressway in.
Worth knowing before you set off. Our premises sit outside the Birmingham Clean Air Zone, which covers the area inside the A4540 Middleway ring road. B12 0HU falls just beyond that boundary, so collecting from us need not mean paying the daily charge. It is the route that catches people out. Approach from the wrong side and you can clip the zone without meaning to, so put your vehicle and your journey through the council’s zone checker before you travel.
If you would rather not travel at all, express delivery runs 1 to 2 working days and standard 3 to 5, free on UK mainland orders over £750. Full terms sit on the delivery policy page. Ring ahead on 0121 655 0146 and we will have the order boxed and waiting on the counter. Most lines are not held in any depth, so if what you want is not on the shelf we can usually have it here for the next day, provided the order lands with us before noon.
Come in and talk it through with somebody who fits this stuff for a living. There is more about the business on our about page, and the contact page carries the rest, including the trade account application.
Frequently asked questions
Can I just turn up, or do I need an appointment?
Just turn up. We are open Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 17:00, and closed on public holidays. Ringing first on 0121 655 0146 is a good idea if you want a particular camera out of its box and running on a screen when you walk in, or if you are travelling a long way for one item.
Do I need a trade account to buy from you?
No. Almost everything at the counter is open to anyone at list price. A small number of lines are trade only and show “Login for Price” instead of a figure, and those need an approved trade account behind them. Accounts are meant for installers and they carry trade pricing, so if you fit cameras for a living, ask us about one. For a single system on a single house, a card is all you need.
How many cameras does a three-bedroom house need?
Usually three or four. It depends far more on the shape of the plot than on the number of bedrooms, so come in and describe the layout and we will sketch it out with you rather than guess from a postcode. Positions matter more than the count. Two cameras in the right places will out-perform six in the wrong ones.
Can I install it myself?
Many people do. A modern NVR with IP cameras runs one cable per camera carrying both power and picture, which takes most of the fiddle out of the job. You need to be comfortable on a ladder and handy with a drill, and willing to feed cable through a loft or along a soffit without losing your temper. Where an installer earns the money is a high frontage, or a long cable run you would not fancy doing twice.