If
you are considering to complement your home
intercom system with a video entry system,
it is not a good idea to install a stand-alone video doorphone appliance. These appliances
are a good choice only as stand-alone viewing equipments, that is if you only want viewing
functions (door, pool area or nursery), with no intercom functionality within your home.
This remains true even though the in-home video set incorporates a telephone handset
instead of a plain audio handset, or even if two or three in-home video sets can be hooked
to the same door module.What you probably need is a system
overall that will allow you to speak to a guest at your door from any handset inside the
home and be able to see the visitor from any of these locations where a handset is
available. Note that the video door module will not alert your
home
intercom system
when your guest hits
the call button. So you would also need to install the intercom
doorphone next to the video doorphone. Aside from being inelegant, this obviously creates
a conflict for the visitor: which button to push? The stand-alone video system will not
interoperate with any telephone intercom system, and vice versa. Many other functional
conflicts arise which make both systems downright incompatible with one another.
Hence this is an undesirable setup.
A simple, elegant and effective solution is to
install rather a mini-camera/modulator
system which easily integrates to your TV cable
distribution system. Of course, you can always connect the mini camera directly to the TV
set in your kitchen (or wherever else) through a coax cable. This is the simplest solution
of all! A small TV set makes it all nice and neat. The TV set does not even have to be
close to the phone.
If you need to see your guests
from every location where a handset is available, you need to make available at
every wall cable jack the images coming in from your mini camera. To do so, you connect
the camera to an RF (radio frequency) modulator placed at the head end of the cable
wiring. The output of the modulator delivers to your coax cable system, which makes the
camera images available everywhere. The modulator allows you to select a specific channel
to view the camera images either from your cable box or from the UHF band of your TV
sets (channels 70 to 125 on Cable or 14 to 69 on UHF). You will probably set the TV set in
your kitchen to the selected channel on standby. When your telephone intercom system
indicates via distinctive ring that a guest is at your door while you are in the kitchen,
you'll just pick up the phone, watch the screen to identify the visitor and attend to the
call. If you pick up the call from anywhere else and the TV set available at the location
was turned off, you'll just have to turn it on, select the appropriate channel to screen your visitor, and
attend to the call. The time out on door intercom calls with the Ennovah
systems is very long.
So, no hurry, no hassle. Also if you are monitoring the pool area, front or back porch and
need to say something as a result of your watch, you can directly dial the access code to
the doorphone from the extension phone and speak out.
How much cost-effective is this solution? It
costs you less that a video door phone appliance, and gives you unlimited flexibility. You
can have dedicated monitoring mini TV sets at locations of your choice. The convenience to
expand and restrict is all
yours.
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