A few weeks back the house got egged (we suspect the neighbors kids, long story). We park the G's inside the garage, but if they were outside, i'm sure they would have caught some eggs. So I figured it was time to juice in the video surveillance. Picked up an SVAT 4 camera system with IR nightvision and 160g DVR.
http://www.amazon.com/SVAT-CV0204DVR...717257&sr=8-12
1st one I got had a bad HD/DVR so it had to be exchanged. Overall the system is pretty decent for $600. I ran all the camera wires through the attic, into a cabinet in the garage and mounted the cameras under the soffit.
Connected the dvr to a super-duper old school commodore 64 monitor I had laying around. The kicker is the entire system is Internet accessable, when you hook up the DVR to Internet access. So I can view, record and manipulate everything on the system from a computer with Internet access.
The usable camera range is around 40 ft during the day and about 25 ft at night with some outside lighting. If anyone is thinking about doing something like this or has a security issue, I highly recommend it...especially if you can get into an attic to run the wiring. With only 4 cameras I can monitor the driveway, street, front yard, front door and both front/side areas of the house, and an empty lot next door. If I had to do it over again, I would prob up the budget to around $1000 for a better/upgradeable HD DVR with even more features, but the SVAT system is not bad for only a $600 price tag.