Excellent Idea!

You could even talk to the end users of the video, the police and courts. It has been my experience that the installers and sellers of these systems know so little that the shouldn't be allowed to even be in the business.

Sometimes the systems aren't even in English or Spanish, the resolution is so poor that you couldn't identify your own mother ten feet from the camera because the recorded information is extremely compressed. And to make matters worse, you can record video, but neither the owner or the police can figure out how to get it off of the digital recorder and when you call tech support, there isn't anyone there because it was invented by 3 guys in a shed in some third world country.

Surprise. That could explain the $199 sales price for the complete system.

Streaming video is recorded at 168MB per second. If you expect to record 90 days of video to a 30GB hard drive, then don't be surprised that it's so compressed as to be unusable to anyone except as an example of what not to buy.

Check this out: http://www.gobroomecounty.com/dpw/DPWSecTraining.php

[Ed Note: This comment was posted by a very respectable law enforcement entity. And yeah, I sort-of dropped the ball on this. I think it needs to be picked back up after the first of the year. Would you guys help?]