Colour cameras from California-based Rainbow have been installed at automotive stores throughout Sweden. The client, Micro AB, sells car accessories and spare parts direct to motorists. (In the UK the company would equate to Unipart and in the US the equivalent would be Pep Boys, Kragen Auto Parts or Trak Auto.)
The stores are using Rainbow's 1/3" colour DSP 460 line cameras which can function at a minimum illumination of 0.3 lux in high gain mode at F1.2 and come as PAL or NTSC models.
Fourteen stores have already received the cameras and a total of 28 will have the units by the end of 2007. The cameras are being used with eight-channel digital video recorders (DVRs) from New York-based Aventura Technologies who recently provided recording to NASA and its Shuttle Discovery Programme.
Images are monitored remotely by the client from a control centre at Helsingborg in southern Sweden. Part of the Bilia Group, Micro AB has its Swedish headquarters in Stockholm. The Rainbow brand is well established in Scandinavia, being used by a prominent garage chain in Denmark as well as by the Danish police force and highway authorities, all of whom report good results with the equipment.
The distributor and systems consultant on the project was Secure Vision International whose managing director, Kenneth Fagerland, said, "Shrinkage is a significant problem for retail vendors who cannot afford downtime with equipment. For this reason Rainbow units were chosen since they have proved consistently robust. The cameras give particularly realistic colours across the red tones, approximating to what the human eye expects to see and so contributing to user confidence."
