Is the ability to save pictures worth it in an inspection camera?

Question

I am about to run a whole ton of communication cable in an existing two-story house, and so I am considering buying an inspection camera to help with this. As I started looking around, they range in price from about $75 on sale to $800. I'm not a pro contractor, but this will be a tool I use a few times a year (mostly to help fishing wires), so I don't think I need anything really high-end: One model I was considering was the Royobi Tek4 Inspection Camera (which is ~$140).

What all the sub-$250 units seem to be missing is the ability to store images ("take pictures") on an SD card or whatever.

So my question is this: if you own an inspection camera, how often do you actually store images, and how useful is the ability? If you don't have a model that can do this, do you often wish you did (or end up using another camera to take a picture of the screen)? For casual, non-pro use, is it worthwhile to spend $100+ additional on this ability?

Answer 1

Well, I don't think you will buy such thing again in the next years, so I suggest that you consider it a major purchase and plane for all reasonable usecases, not only for laying cables. You can use it later for all sorts of inspections - finding sources of noise, finding sources of leaks, finding clogs in ducts and sewers, etc.

I believe ability to take pictures can be worth it - you can post a picture here and ask if that's mold or you can send it to the utility company to convince them that it's a leak on the common property and not on yours or you can use it to post something really curious to your twitter/facebook/whatever account. You decide whether these usecases are worth considering and how often you might encounter them.

One very important thing is you have to actually test how the thing works. It may be that it saves pictures of infernal quality that can only be used as garbage.

Answer 2

I think the target demographic for saving pictures is pros who want to show the homeowner what they're talking about so they're not accused of making things up. When would a homeowner want to save pictures?

• You want to take the picture in to the store / to your friend / post it here to solicit help with something
• You find something like mold and want to document it for insurance purposes

That's the only things I can think of, and to me it's not worth the money. I've got other tools I'd rather spend the money on that would get used a lot more often.

Answer 3

Unless you get a very wide field of view and a very good quality image a static picture will not tell you much anyway, so a video function would be more useful that static pictures.

However I believe you can get USB inspection cameras that are cheap and allows you to record/view on your laptop - they may be a better option for DIY.