Colour Wireless Camera With Portable LCD Screen
The Colour Wireless Camera With Portable LCD Screen has got to be one of my favourite spy gadgets by far. I only had the opportunity to play with it a couple of weeks ago, and had great fun doing so! Yes I know, this is another spy cam review… but I do frequently get asked on what spy cams people should buy! There are so many available, and knowing what to buy is not easy.
This package is available on Play.com for £139.99. It’s not cheap, but then you can’t get it much cheaper if you buy directly from China. Of course importing anything from another country is a minefield due to warranties, import tax and language challenges. It’s definitely worth getting a spy camera from a company in your country simply due to the ease of returning an item.
Anyway, the camera has a transmitting power of about 10mW, giving you a line of sight transmitting distance of 100 metres or about 30 metres in a building. I certainly achieved this in my tests, with several walls and doors in the way. The picture quality is great. The monitor has a video output, allowing you to connect the receiver to a TV to see a larger version of the received picture. So this means you get the advantage of a portable and extensible receiver.
The monitor uses rechargeable mobile telephone style batteries, which mean the receiver is small and easy to carry. It’s capable of receiving up to 4 different 2.4GHz video channels, so you can run multiple cameras and view each one without interference. It doesn’t have the ability to show all channels at once sadly, but just a single push of the button changes the received channel anyway.
The camera is very small and runs from a single 9V battery. Battery life is probably a few hours, so you’re best to use 6xAA batteries to get a longer life. Good quality AA rechargable batteries are rated at 2300mAh+, and 9V PP3 batteries are rated at 170mAh.
The unit mAh refers to the current consumption the battery can provide for an hour. Loosely relating to how long a battery can last. So for a camera running at 80mA, so you’d get about (170 / 80 = ) 2 hours from a 9V PP3 battery, and about (2300 / 80 = ) 25 hours from the AA batteries.