Security Cameras near you

Good placement is a compromise between three things: seeing a face, covering a route and staying out of reach. Cameras mounted high enough to be safe from a person on the ground are often too high to identify anyone, so the usual answer is a mix, with at least one camera at head height in a protected position covering the approach where people must slow down, such as a gate or the top of a driveway.

Light is the harder half. Australian sun is unforgiving: a camera aimed west into the late afternoon sun produces a silhouette, and a camera under a verandah looking out at a bright yard will expose for the yard. Infrared night vision reflects off a wall or a flyscreen a few centimetres in front of the lens and washes out the whole image. These are all placement problems, not brand problems, and an installer who walks the site at the right time of day will find them.

Then there is the cable and the power. Cameras drawing power over a network cable still need that cable run from a recorder or switch, which usually lives in a cupboard or the garage, and the recorder itself needs a powerpoint. New wiring, a new circuit or anything at the switchboard is licensed electrical work, so ask which parts of the quote are electrical and who holds the licence for them.

Recording is regulated at state and territory level, and the rules are not the same across the country. Queensland's Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 makes it an offence to use a listening device to overhear, record, monitor or listen to a private conversation, with an exception where the person using the device is a party to that conversation. Victoria has its own Surveillance Devices Act 1999 in force. Other states and territories have their own surveillance devices legislation with their own definitions and exceptions.

The practical consequence is that the microphone in a camera deserves separate thought from the lens. A camera that picks up conversations at a neighbour's back door, on a shared landing or across a fence can engage listening-device provisions even where the vision itself is unremarkable, and many cameras record audio by default. Ask the installer to show you how to turn audio off, and decide deliberately whether to leave it on.

Position matters as much as capability. Aim cameras so they cover your own property, your own entries and the approach to them, and avoid framing a neighbour's windows, yard or living areas. If you rent, are in strata or are in a complex with shared driveways and corridors, check your by-laws and your agreement before mounting anything, and ask your local council about local laws or planning requirements that may apply. If you are unsure how your state's surveillance devices law applies to your situation, the OAIC points people to their state or territory Attorney-General's Department.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is direct about the federal law: the Privacy Act does not cover a security camera operated by an individual acting in a private capacity, but state or territory laws may apply. The Privacy Act sets out the Australian Privacy Principles for Australian Government agencies and for organisations above the turnover threshold, collectively known as APP entities, and a household camera on a suburban house is not one of them.

That cuts both ways. If a neighbour's camera overlooks your yard, a privacy complaint to the OAIC about a private individual will not go anywhere. The OAIC suggests trying to resolve the matter with the neighbour directly first, then contacting a community justice centre or a neighbourhood mediation service, checking with your local council about local laws or planning permission, and looking at strata by-laws where they apply.

If you are in the position of the camera owner, the same logic tells you how to avoid a dispute: talk to the neighbour before you mount anything that faces their way, angle or mask the view so it stops at your boundary, and be willing to show them what the camera actually sees. Where a camera does fall under the Privacy Act, the OAIC's guidance for covered organisations gives a useful model even for households: tell people their image may be captured before recording them, keep recordings secure, and destroy or de-identify them when they are no longer needed.

Wired cameras win on reliability. One cable carries power and data, there is no battery to flatten and no dropout when someone streams a film in the next room, and the recorder keeps working when the internet does not. The cost is installation: cable has to get from a cupboard to an eave, which in a single-storey house with a roof space is manageable and in a two-storey rendered house with no access can be genuinely difficult.

Wireless cameras win on speed and on rentals, where drilling and cabling may not be permitted. They depend on Wi-Fi reaching the mounting point through brick, render or foil-backed insulation, which is often the real limit, and battery models trade recording time against how long you want to spend on a ladder. As for storage, local recording keeps footage in your hands but disappears if the recorder is stolen or destroyed, while cloud recording survives that at the price of a subscription and an internet dependence. Many households end up with cloud for the doorbell and local recording for everything else.

Cameras are goods and the installation is a service, and the ACCC says consumers automatically receive consumer guarantees when they buy both. Goods must be of acceptable quality, which the ACCC describes as safe, durable and free from defects, must match their description, and must be fit for any purpose you made known. The installation must be carried out with an acceptable level of care and skill.

That last guarantee is the one that matters most in camera work, because the common complaint is not a dead camera but a working camera pointed at the wrong thing, or a night image that shows nothing useful. If you told the installer you needed to identify people at the front gate, that is a stated purpose. Put it in writing before the job, keep the quote and any correspondence, and if the result cannot do it, raise the service guarantee rather than the manufacturer's warranty. The ACCC notes that a manufacturer's warranty is an extra promise that applies in addition to your consumer rights, and cannot replace, change or take them away.