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Matthew said: Wondering what the best body cam would be for a security officer and which one would have the best audio.
That’s a good question! The first thing we should mention is that your local laws may affect what you or your employees can or cannot wear, check before you find yourself liable for invasion of privacy, or anything like that. You may be able to record video but not audio, you may be able to record video in a public place, but need someone’s signature before you can legally record in a private place, just make sure you’re sticking to your local laws and you won’t get yourself in trouble.
As far as the cameras themselves go, most of them seem to be roughly shaped like a pager and can record without any extra gear, unfortunately, having a pager over your heart means that your own hands often cover the camera, and there are many accessories to deal with that, from glass frame attachments, to over the ear and over the shoulder attachments, but they will all cost you extra. Since you’re interested in audio, you should know that you won’t find extremely high fidelity microphones in a small package that’s expected to be far away from whatever it’s recording. You should be able to make out what’s being said in relatively quiet environments, but don’t expect great quality on any camera.
It’s still pretty hard to find cameras geared towards consumers, most companies are trying to get police department business, but you can find a few market to the general public. For around $300 you can buy a PatrolEyes HD Police Body Camera with 16GB of storage. At full 1080p HD you will need about 5GB/hour, but you can lower the resolution to SD and that will only require 2.1GB/hour, so you should get around 8 hours on 16GB. If that’s not enough, you do have the option to go for the 32GB version for an extra $50, but the battery will still last you 8 hours.
You should be able to make out what’s being said in relatively quiet environments, but don’t expect great quality on any camera.
For about $350 you can also buy a Titan T3-BWC, it records in 720p, it can connect to radios and it has it’s own push-to-talk button, and it will record for about 9 hours onto 16GB of built-in storage. Both of those cameras offer administrator access, and allow the regular user to playback the videos, but only the administrator to actually delete them.
You could also look at much cheaper options, some cameras go for as little as $100 to $150, but have a good look at them before settling for one of those, they tend to have 2 hour batteries or less, if you want the cameras to monitor full shifts, those will not work for you, they also tend not to have any kind of administrator access, so an employee could delete the videos if they’re likely to get them in trouble.