User friendly video today or tomorrow

The overall use of closed circuit television (CCTV) has increased dramatically over the past few years, and with the greater acceptance by the public of the use of such technology, we are now starting to see greater use of video technologies within the transport sector. However, as it is intended that these products are used for applications varying from conventional external surveillance to more demanding image processing applications, international manufacturers of video cameras attempt to make them very flexible in their application. This flexibility in turn causes a number of problems to those less experienced with the use of video cameras. Ideally, manufacturers of CCTV products would like their camera to be all things to all men. This clearly is not the case and is not possible. The use of multi function or pull down menus within the setup parameters of conventional cameras can be counter productive in many applications. Usually the overall parameters are set incorrectly and thus do not offer the best performance results to the user. One of the greatest dangers of use of new technology such as video in the traffic or transport market is that `experts´ can easily be created. It is quite common to have people in your department who understand all about video as they have a camcorder at home. These people can cause a number of problems both in specification of video systems and their overall employment and operation