These are the situations Brooklyn owners, tenants, boards and businesses describe when they call. Each is answered here in full and not repeated in the FAQ further down.
Tenants, landlords and shared hallways
I rent the top floor of a two-family in Bensonhurst. Can I have Hanwha cameras put up on my own without asking the owner?
Not if they involve drilling. Installers who work in the city put it plainly: drilling inside a rented apartment, and certainly on the outside of the building, needs written approval from the landlord, and in co-ops and condos it usually needs the board as well. A wired Hanwha system means holes for each camera and a cable route through walls or floors, so it is a conversation with the owner first. In a two-family that conversation is often easy, because the owner downstairs usually wants the same front door and alley covered. A common answer is that the owner commissions the system, puts the recorder in the shared basement, and shares viewing of the front door with you. If the owner says no to drilling, an indoor camera that watches your own apartment door from inside is a different matter, and we can talk about what makes sense.
I own a six-family walk-up in Bushwick. Where can I point the hallway and lobby cameras without upsetting tenants?
Cover the shared spaces, not the homes. The views that protect a walk-up are the street door from outside, the vestibule, the mailboxes, each landing looking down the corridor, the roof door and the basement or rear-yard door. On a Brooklyn apartment building job described on our own site, every stair-hall camera was aimed down the corridor and never at a unit door, which was the board's biggest privacy worry, and audio was off. Brick Underground's co-op lawyer column makes the same point about doorbells: a camera should not be pointing into someone else's apartment. We frame each view with you on site, and on a Hanwha camera we can also mask parts of the image, so a corridor camera that cannot avoid a door at the end of the hall simply blacks out that door in the recording. Tell tenants before the work what the cameras cover and how long footage is kept. Most objections come from not knowing.
Our tenants heard we are replacing the cameras and are worried about face recognition. What should we tell them?
Tell them exactly what the system will and will not do, in writing. Brooklyn has a history here: at Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brownsville, tenants organized against a facial-recognition entry plan at buildings that already had ordinary cameras, and the story became part of the City Council's discussion of tenant privacy. Ordinary security recording, the kind that shows who walked through the lobby at what time, is what most Brooklyn buildings install and what most tenants accept. Hanwha's AI features can detect people and vehicles to make searching footage faster, which is not the same as identifying anyone by face. If a system is ever tied to keyless entry, New York City's tenant data privacy rules for smart access come in, which is a separate project. For a camera replacement, a one-page notice listing the camera locations, the retention period and who can view the footage answers most of the worry.
Brownstones, facades and the street
Can you put cameras on our brownstone without damaging the stone?
Yes, if the fixings go in the right places. Brownstone is a soft sandstone face over brick, and it chips if a bracket is forced into carved work or an anchor sits too close to the edge of a block. We anchor into mortar joints wherever the bracket allows, or into the brick behind the stone, and never into carved surrounds, cornices or the face of a decorative block. Many owners prefer cameras on the underside of a projection, such as a lintel, a cornice or the areaway, where the stone is plain and the camera is half hidden. Each hole is angled slightly downward and sealed so water drains out rather than into the wall. A Yelp review of a Brooklyn installer praised "super neat work, no wires showing or hanging," and that is the standard we hold to: the cable goes straight into the building behind the camera, so there is nothing across the stone to see.
Our Crown Heights apartment house has an entrance canopy. Is under the canopy a good place for the door camera?
Often it is the best place. A camera on the canopy's framing is out of the rain, harder to reach, and looks straight down the path to the door, which gives a good view of faces. On a landmarked building it has another advantage: the Landmarks Preservation Commission's rules allow small, simply designed fixtures, cameras included, on the framing underneath a canopy, provided they are not visible except from underneath. That keeps the camera off the primary facade altogether. The things we check are the canopy's structure and how a cable can reach the building wall without showing, usually by following the canopy's own support into the wall, and the lighting under the canopy at night, which can wash out a camera if a fixture shines straight into the lens.
Is there a Hanwha camera small enough that it will not look like a security box on our Park Slope stoop?
Yes. Hanwha Vision's 2nd Gen X Series AI compact cameras, announced in May 2026, come in 2, 5 and 8 megapixel versions, are rated IP66 for weather and IK10 for impact, and were designed with a compact form to reduce visual intrusion. A small dome or compact camera under a cornice or lintel reads as part of the architecture rather than an addition to it. The trade-off is that a smaller camera has less room for a long lens or strong infrared, so for a stoop that is close to the camera it is ideal, and for a long rear yard we may choose a larger camera at the back of the house, where nobody on the street sees it. We hold a sample up in the spot before deciding, so you can see the size against your facade.
Is it legal for my Midwood house cameras to see the sidewalk and the street?
Recording your own entrances, and the sidewalk and street that come into the frame around them, is what nearly every house camera in Brooklyn does, and it is not what gets owners into trouble. The lines people run into are different: aiming a camera into a neighbor's windows or yard, recording sound, which falls under New York's one-party consent rule, and in shared buildings pointing a camera into someone else's apartment. Courtesy matters too. A house on East 15th Street drew news coverage for more than 50 cameras and repeated 311 complaints from neighbors. We frame each view so it covers your door, your car and your path, use privacy masking where a neighbor's window falls in the frame, and leave audio off. We are installers, not lawyers, so if you have a specific dispute, talk to one.
Wiring old buildings
Do we need an electrician to have Hanwha cameras installed?
Usually not for the cameras themselves. Hanwha cameras are powered over the same Ethernet cable that carries their video, from a PoE switch in the network location, so there is no outlet or line-voltage wiring at the camera. What the system does need is one good outlet where the switch, recorder and battery backup sit, ideally on a circuit that is not shared with a washing machine or a space heater. If that outlet does not exist, that is electrician work, and we tell you before the job so it can be done first. The camera work itself falls under New York's security installer licensing through the Department of State, which is the license we hold. A licensed master electrician can register with the Department of State for a waiver to do this work in the municipality where the electrician is licensed, but most electricians leave camera systems to low-voltage installers.
Our Ocean Parkway co-op wants cameras on every floor. What kind of cable goes up the riser?
Cat6 rated for the space it passes through. In a riser or a plenum, city installers specify plenum-rated Cat6, and we follow that so the cable meets the fire rating the space requires. Each camera gets its own home run back to the switch, or, in a tall building, to a switch on an intermediate floor that links back to the main rack, which keeps every run inside Ethernet's length limit. Where the cable passes through each floor, the opening is fire-stopped. We also check what else lives in the riser, since older buildings sometimes have riser space packed with abandoned cable from earlier phone, cable TV and alarm systems; clearing dead cable, with the building's permission, often makes room for the new runs. The board gets a riser drawing with the camera schedule, so the route is approved along with the cameras.
We want a PTZ camera on the corner of our Sunset Park warehouse. Will our existing switch run it?
Maybe not, and it is worth checking before the camera arrives. Tec-Tel's overview of Hanwha hardware notes that the X and Q Series run mostly on standard PoE+ at 30 watts, while some P Series 4K cameras and the U Series PTZ cameras need PoE++ at 60 or 90 watts. An older switch that was bought for phones or fixed cameras may offer only PoE+ on each port, or may have a total power budget too small to add a PTZ on top of everything else. We read the switch's specification and the camera's power draw, add up the whole budget including infrared at night, and either use a port that can supply the PTZ, add a dedicated injector, or replace the switch. For a corner PTZ on a warehouse, we also plan its cable path and mount for wind, since a PTZ on a long arm moves more than a fixed camera.
Our Williamsburg store has cable left from a Samsung-era system. Can the new Hanwha cameras use it?
If it tests good, very often yes. Many systems from the years before Hanwha's 2015 takeover of Samsung Techwin were already network systems on Cat5e or Cat6, and that cable can carry a current Hanwha camera if it passes a certification test and the run is not damaged at the ends. We test each run with a cable analyzer, re-terminate the connectors, and keep every run that passes. Older analog systems used coax, which does not carry a network camera directly; those runs are usually replaced, and the coax is left in place or removed depending on what the space and the landlord prefer. The test result is on the quote, run by run, so you can see why each cable stays or goes.
Schools, funded buildings and lobbies
We run a Brooklyn school and an affordable building with HUD funding. What kind of camera system fits buildings like these?
One built on equipment your funders and insurers will accept, and designed around how the buildings are actually used. A Brooklyn competitor steers buildings with any federal funding, such as HUD, project-based Section 8 or public-housing money, to Axis, Hanwha or Avigilon, and our own school camera page describes a yeshiva campus off 13th Avenue in Borough Park with 38 cameras across three buildings joined at odd floors and a bus yard hit by catalytic converter thefts. Jobs like those need entrances, stairwells, yards and drop-off areas covered, a single view across buildings, and access limited to the right staff. For that, Hanwha cameras on a WAVE server are a strong fit, with user rights set by role. For the affordable building, the same principles as any walk-up or elevator building apply, with extra attention to documentation, because funders often want to see what was installed.
Packages keep disappearing from our Bed-Stuy building's vestibule. Where should a camera go to actually identify the person?
Facing the inner door from inside the vestibule, at about head height or a little above, so the camera sees a face as someone walks in. CBS New York reported one Brooklyn package theft where cameras captured the suspect being buzzed into a building on Lexington Avenue, and that is the shot owners want: a clear face, a clear time and the moment the door opens. A camera high in a corner looking down at the floor sees hats and the tops of heads. We also cover the mailbox and package area from a second angle, because the face camera rarely sees what the person picked up. Lighting is the other half; a vestibule with a bright street door behind the person turns faces into silhouettes in the afternoon, so we choose a camera that handles strong backlight and test it at the worst hour.
