Hi everyone I hope this is the correct place to post this. As you can see I'm new here, so please forgive me if it isn't.
Often times with things that I am very experienced with and knowledgeable about, whether it be in a professional capacity or just a hobby, I enjoy helping others with their needs. It's my hope that I will run across similar friendly people here that could provide some sound advice. I have significant experience with and knowledge of building PCs, residential and commercial networking, both equipment and wiring, electrical work, home theater components, wiring, layout, things of that nature. However I only have limited experience with CCTV systems and I'm humbly requesting help building a new CCTV system for our family business.
My goal is to layout, design, and install a system that meets our CCTV needs and provides a good balance of features, upgrade-ability, and affordability. I would love to get suggestions on system design, scale, popular equipment brands, etc. I would hate to make all these decisions on my own, only to find myself a few months down the road saying, "Man I wish I would have used these other type of cameras.", or "If I knew that existed I would have much rather gotten those!" haha.
Here's what we have:
We have a medium sized family retail business in central Arkansas with our showroom floor and warehouse under one roof. We also have a couple of offices, shop space to work on our products, and a delivery/truck dock and dumpster area on the side of our building. Right now we have 2 simple Lorex color cameras (about 2-3 years old). Each runs to a normal 19-20" television in our front office. One gives us a very very narrow viewing angle of our parking lot (we can only see 2.5 of our 10 parking spaces) and a decent view of our loading dock on the side of the building.
Here's what I want:
A) Our current parking lot camera has a fairly narrow FOV. The camera is just inside our building, in plain sight, looking through our large front glass windows aimed at our parking lot. We can only see 2.5 of our 10 parking spaces. We would like something that we could get a much larger FOV, so we can actually see what's in front of our building. I've thought about mounting something outside the building, on one of the front corners, to help get a better angle, but we still need a camera with a better FOV.
B) Right now we have 2 cameras. I could possibly see us expanding up to 4 total in the future but never more than that.
C) This is what I'm thinking will be tricky: I want to be able to view these 2 (or 3, or 4) cameras in 2 places. I want to have a monitor in our front office and I want another monitor in my personal office which is about 50-75ft away from the front office. Ideally I would like to use a 26" LED HDTV or the like to view the cameras, but I don't know equipment exists that would allow me to see a split screen or quad screen view of the cameras on the monitor. And I would really like to be able to view either of the cameras full screen if I wanted.
Additional info:
At some point I would like to be able to integrate a DVR that would record up to a few days or a week of video. I'm hoping to stay under $1000 initial investment w/o a DVR but our hard limit is $2000 for the start up. Providing power, data cables, coax, etc to each camera is easy and we can do the work ourselves. We have a sever room with a rack that can hold any equipment if needed.
Any advice would be much appreciated and you would have my gratitude. Also, is there a widely accepted and trusted CCTV vendor that consistently has low prices, good service, and are dependable?
