How to Paint a Security Camera

Let's talk about painting security cameras. Now, there is definitely a wrong way to do it and the right way to do it. The industry as a whole gives you three options. You can go with a white camera, you can go with a black camera, or you can go with a white and black camera. That's it. That's the only option. Both homeowners and business owners find themselves where they want to paint the housing of the cameras so it doesn't distract from the architecture of the building. And so we're going to show you the right way to paint a security camera. Now, one word of advice. There are manufacturers out there and suppliers out there that will void your warranty if you paint a security camera. We do not void warranties if you paint your cameras, just do it the right way. You still get your five-year warranty, everything's fine. The only thing that you lose by painting your camera is the right to send it back for a full cash refund. The first thing we want to do is prepare the area and get some protective gear on. So let's do that.

(01:12):

All you need is a pair of gloves so you don't get overspray or paint on your hands. You can use a respirator if you want to, but if you do it outside, you're fine. Lay down some cardboard so you don't leave overspray on your concrete.

(01:27):

You'll need an area where you can spray, that's what the cardboard is for. You need a camera. Now we're going to do a dome, a vandal dome, it's called a turret dome camera here. But the same things that we're about to show, you apply to any type of camera, whether it's bullet style or dome or vandal dome.

(01:43)

We need some scuff pads. Now you take the scuff pads to scuff up the surface of the camera and take the shine off of it so the paint will stick. We've got our spray can here, a metal outdoor spray paint. Any standard rust oleum or anything else will work just fine. We need a little bit of tape because it's important where we spray, and a razor so that we can work with the tape a little bit. Now, you don't have to, but it's best to take the camera apart and take the camera from the base so that you can paint everything a hundred percent.

(02:15)

The only places that you really don't want to get paint are on the lens area here. So we're going to mask off this lens area here. Make sure that no overspray or no paint gets on this unit here. The other place that you want to throw some tape over is your connections because you don't want overspray getting inside there and causing a bad connection with the cable.

(02:36)

Now, normally there are other cameras that will have a little microphone either here or here or somewhere. If you have a little tiny hole for a microphone, you want to put something in that hole so the spray doesn't go in and seal it up. Luckily for us, the microphone on this camera is right here on the front of the lens, so when we mask this up here, it takes care of the microphone as well.

(02:56)

Okay, so we've taken the camera apart. We have the camera itself, the bezel, and the protective shield around it. We're going to paint them individually so that a hundred percent of the camera is painted, no matter where we put it, there won't be any indication that the camera used to be white. Okay, the first thing we want to do is mask off the areas that we don't want to be painted. So we take a little bit of 3M frog tape, and we just start masking right around the edge like that. We cut the stuff into the middle, making sure that no overspray will get in there.

(03:35)

Throw one more piece right over it to make sure. Why is that important? If we get overspray on the lens of the camera, the infrared light is going to bounce off that overspray on the outer lens and come right back into the camera, and your night vision's, it's going to look foggy and you won't know why. And during the day, your colors won't be vivid. They'll just kind of be washed out for some reason and again, you won't know why. So you want to really make sure you can't get overspray on the lens. The other area we want to protect is the connection with the cable.

(04:10)

The Rest of this stuff is ready to go. We're going to take this little screw out of here that locks it in place so that we don't paint that, save that to the side, but now we're ready to move on to the next step. We want to take the shine off of the metal, all three pieces so that the paint will stick, otherwise, it could actually bubble. It's not good. These are just three umbrella pads that you get at Home Depot and you just rub the housing good, so you get the shine off.

(04:49)

The last thing I'm going to do is kind of check the edge of the paint right around here because we don't want to see any little edge of white after we get done painting this. So we just go through and we make sure that we get right to the edge of those things and then you'll be better off.

(05:06)

We've got everything taped up and now everything's scuffed up so that the paint will stick and now we're ready to spray. So you just do normal spray can procedures. You stay about 8 to 10 inches away from it. The first thing you want to do is just leave a light sticky coat on it and then let that dry, because that's kind of the basis for everything to stick to doing that. So you can see, you can still see that I'm not hitting it heavy. I'm just going to give it enough spraying and then let it dry for about 5 or 10 minutes. Let's come over and we'll knock out the base.

(05:56)

Okay, let's let that dry for about 10 minutes. It's been about 10 minutes, and so now we can kind of hit it again with another coat. This one could be a little heavier, but it's better to use three coats than one heavy one. Looks like we've got our last coat on there, and now we're just going to let it dry before we put the camera back together.

(06:35)

There you have it. Beautiful green surveillance camera, ready to go on the house. This thing's going to look amazing on my house. Seriously.