advanced radio solutions
Body Worn Cameras for Security & Safety
With body worn cameras you can improve the safety and accountability of your front-line teams. Body-worn video delivers instant valuable insight from the wearer’s perspective to not only protect your staff but also give reassurance whilst capturing valuable evidence.
Staff Safety
A body worn camera changes the incident, and what happens after it.
Digicom Wireless supplies Motorola body-worn cameras to front-line teams across Australia: security officers and mobile patrols, retail and hospitality staff, health workers, transport crews and council field officers. The camera is rarely the reason anyone starts the conversation. Staff safety is.
The Problem
People who face the public want to feel safe doing it
When they do not, the cost shows up everywhere except the incident report. Complaints become one account against another with nothing to separate them. Performance drops in the roles that involve the counter, the door and the ward. OHS reports pile up, insurance and legal claims sit open for months, and employee turnover climbs in exactly the positions that are hardest to fill.
None of that is solved by another sign on the wall. Staff safety is judged by what your people have in the thirty seconds when something goes wrong, and by what you can show afterwards.
What Changes
The camera does two jobs: one during, one after
During the incident, saying that the camera is now recording gives the other person a reason to stop, and gives your staff member something to say that is not an argument. That is the de-escalation part, and it is why the cameras go on the people facing the public rather than on the people supervising them.
After the incident, you have body-worn video instead of two versions of events. Evidence that holds up closes a complaint quickly, supports a claim, or stops one before it is filed. For teams whose footage may end up in a proceeding, the handling requirements are stricter, and we cover that on the law enforcement page.
De-escalation
The announcement is the tool, not the recording. A camera on the chest and a clear statement that it is running gives an aggressive person an exit, and gives your staff member a script to follow instead of a confrontation to win.
Evidence capture
Vision and audio with the time and date attached, and location on the models that carry GNSS. It removes the argument about what was said and in what order. It also gives your incident response a record to work from, in the same way recorded radio traffic does on the comms side.
Accountability both ways
The footage protects the customer, the patient and the passenger as much as it protects the person wearing it. If your officer handled it badly, you find out from the video rather than from a solicitor. Say that out loud when you roll the cameras out, because a camera framed only as protection for the employer gets resisted on the floor.
Agree on the policy before the hardware arrives: who wears a camera, when it records, who can view footage, and how long it is kept. Teams that skip this end up with cameras in the drawer. We work through it with you when we scope the system, along with how the cameras sit next to your radios and your emergency alarm management for incident response.
- Motorola Solutions Platinum Channel Partner
- Supporting security teams across Australia
- Based in Sydney, servicing sites nationally
Start With the Wearer
Who is wearing it decides which camera it is.
These are three different cameras for three different jobs, not three price points on the same one. A patrol officer covering ground all night and a nurse on a ward have almost nothing in common in how they work, what they carry, and where the footage ends up.
Find the description that matches your people first. The specifications are in the next section.
Officers and mobile patrols
The shift is spent moving. Multiple sites in a night, long stretches between them, and incidents that happen where there is no infrastructure to fall back on.
- Ground to cover, often alone and after hours
- No WiFi you can count on when it matters
- Footage that may end up in a proceeding, so where and when it was taken has to be defensible
- Control room wants to see the incident while it is happening, not the next morning
If you already run GPS tracking on your radios for the same reasons, this is the camera that matches it.
Guarding and lone workers
A fixed site with a gatehouse or a control room, a dock rack in the back office, and cameras that get signed out at the start of a shift and handed back at the end of it.
- Site WiFi already in place, so footage offloads on the network you own
- Cameras pooled and reissued, not assigned to one person forever
- Rough handling is normal: gates, fences, plant rooms, weather
- Lone workers who need the camera on the same alert as the radio
Common on facilities management contracts where one team covers a building portfolio.
Front-line retail, health and hospitality
The person wearing this is a shop assistant, a nurse, a duty manager or a ticket officer. They are not an officer, they are not in a duty vest, and they will take the camera off if it is heavy or awkward.
- Light and discreet enough to clip on a uniform shirt or a lanyard
- Worn for a whole shift without becoming a nuisance
- Indoor sites, mostly climate controlled, with WiFi already there
- The point is the difficult customer at the counter, not a pursuit
This is the profile we see most often across retail and hospitality sites.
The Three Cameras
Three Motorola body worn cameras, three different jobs.
All three can be set to start recording automatically when a paired Motorola radio goes into an emergency state over Bluetooth. Which radio models are supported differs by camera, and the trigger is configured server side in the VideoManager device profile rather than on the camera. If you are reviewing your two way radio communications at the same time, tell us and we will check the pairing against your fleet.
Motorola V500
Motorola positions the V500 for police, fire, security guards, paramedics and corrections. It carries a top LCD, RFID touch assign, remote device management and AES-256.
The V500 is the only one of the three with LTE. It is the only camera here that live streams and offloads footage without WiFi, which is what makes it the choice for patrols that are away from a site network for most of the shift.
- Network
- LTE with eSIM, plus WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, WPA2 and WPA3. Live streaming over LTE or WiFi
- Recording
- 1920x1080p, 25 or 30 fps, 0.1 lux sensor, up to 2 minutes pre and post record
- Battery
- 12 hours, recharge in under 4 hours
- Storage
- 128 GB fixed
- Rating
- IP67, MIL-STD-810H, -20C to +50C
- Location
- GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS and SBAS
Motorola VB400
Motorola positions the VB400 for police and security, lone workers and hostile environments. RFID assignment, peer assisted recording, bookmarking and an optional holster sensor.
The battery is integral and not user serviceable, so plan around the dock rather than around spare cells. Live streaming is WiFi only and capped at 640x360, which suits a fixed site with its own network.
- Recording
- 1920x1080p, 25 or 30 fps, down to 0.2 lux, full shift record with up to 2 minute buffer
- Battery
- Up to 12 hours, recharge in under 8 hours
- Storage
- 64 GB fixed and sealed
- Rating
- IP67, MIL-STD-810G, -20C to +50C
- Network
- WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n dual band, WPA2. No LTE. Integral GPS
- Mounting
- Four backing plates, Klick Fast, MOLLE and magnetic
Motorola V200
Motorola positions the V200 for retail, healthcare, hospitality, education and stadiums. Top LCD, a customisable label, and GoLive Audio two way voice.
The V200 is IP54, not IP67. It is rated to +40C, not +50C, and it has no GPS or other satellite location at all. That is a different class of device, not a cheaper one. For an indoor shift on a shop floor or a ward it is the right camera. For an outdoor patrol in an Australian summer, or for footage that has to prove where it was taken, it is not.
- Recording
- 720p and 848x480p, 25 and 30 fps. Pre and post record supported
- Rating
- IP54, MIL-STD-810H, -20C to +40C
- Location
- None
- Battery
- 9 hours continuous, 5 months standby, recharge in under 5 hours
- Wearability
- 121.6 g, low profile swivel clip and lanyard mounting only
- Network
- WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, 2.4 GHz only, WPA2. No LTE
None of these three cameras work on their own. All three run on VideoManager EX, either cloud hosted or installed on your own servers, and a licence or cloud subscription is mandatory. It is what assigns cameras to people, holds the footage, manages who can view and export it, and where the automatic recording trigger from a paired radio is configured.
Digicom scopes the licensing with the hardware so the quote covers the whole system, including docks and the way footage comes off the cameras at the end of a shift. Ask for it as one number, not three.
Radio and Camera, One System
Your radio can start the camera for you.
The moment a worker needs a camera running is the moment they have the least attention to spare for turning one on. Paired over Bluetooth, a Motorola body camera starts recording by itself when the two way radio on the same person enters an emergency state. Nobody has to remember.
Something goes wrong
The worker hits the emergency button, or a lone worker or fall alert fires on its own because they have stopped moving.
The radio raises the alarm
The emergency goes out to the talk group and the control room the way it already does today. Nothing about your radio procedure changes.
The camera starts itself
The paired camera picks up the emergency state over Bluetooth and begins recording, with the pre-record buffer capturing the moments before the button was pressed.
Evidence lands on its own
Footage offloads when the camera is docked, into an evidence system with an audit trail, rather than sitting on a device in a drawer.
There is no pairing menu on the camera itself. The radio trigger is configured server side, in the camera's device profile in VideoManager, so a licence or cloud subscription has to be in place before any of this works. We scope that with the hardware rather than leaving you to discover it later.
If you already run a Motorola fleet, bring us the model numbers and we will confirm what pairs with what before you order anything.
Already running Motorola radios?We supply the fleet, the cameras and the evidence platform, so the pairing is our problem rather than yours.
Check My FleetEvidence Management
The camera is only half of it.
A body worn camera is not a standalone gadget. It is the capture end of an evidence system. What decides whether a recording is still usable six months later is everything that happens after the shift: how the camera was issued, how the footage came off it, where it was stored, who opened it and what was logged when they did.
The V500, VB400 and V200 all run on VideoManager EX, available cloud hosted or installed on premises. It is the same platform across the three models, so a mixed fleet is managed in one place.
What the platform does
01 / Assignment
Cameras go out to a named person
A camera is assigned to an operator before the shift, so the recordings that come back are tied to who was wearing it. On the V500 and VB400 docks that assignment can be done by touching an RFID card to the dock, which is quick enough to survive a shift changeover.
02 / Offload
Docking moves the footage
The camera goes back in the dock at the end of the shift. It charges and it transfers its recordings into VideoManager EX in the same action. Nobody is plugging cameras into a laptop and dragging files into a folder, which is where most informal setups fall apart.
03 / Retention
Footage ages out on your rules
You set how long ordinary footage is held before it is removed, and which recordings are flagged so they stay beyond that period because an incident, claim or review is attached to them.
04 / Access control
Not everyone sees everything
Access is set by role. A frontline operator, a supervisor and whoever handles complaints do not need the same view of the library, and on most sites they should not have it.
05 / Audit trail
The system records who did what
Actions taken on a recording are logged against the account that took them. That trail is usually what makes footage worth having: it is the difference between a video file and an item of evidence somebody can rely on.
06 / Disclosure
Getting footage to the people who need it
When a recording is needed for a court, tribunal, insurer, regulator or internal review, it can be released from the system without the original file leaving your control. The same logic applies to radio voice recording if you run both.
Docking and offload differs by model
V500
Smart Dock
- V500 Smart Dock, 10 bay
- Gigabit ethernet to the dock
- RFID touch assign at the dock
VB400
Dock range
- 1 port dock for small teams and remote posts
- 14 port dock for a shift changeover
- DockController for managing docks
V200
Smart Dock
- V200 Smart Dock, 8 bay
- Single charger for one off use
- Suits a store, ward or venue back office
A VideoManager EX licence or cloud subscription is mandatory. It is not an optional add on and there is no offline mode that gets you around it. None of these three cameras can be handed out and left to run on their own.
Assignment, retention, user access and the device profile that controls how the camera behaves all live on the server. Radio integration is the clearest example: it is configured server side in the VideoManager device profile, and there is no pairing menu on the camera itself. Budget the licence at the same time as the hardware. It is better to know that now than to find it in a quote.
Scoping cloud hosted or on premises, and how many licences?
Discuss Your RequirementsBody worn video usually sits alongside a radio fleet rather than replacing it. If you are building both at once, start with advanced radio solutions and the Motorola range, or ask us for a free system evaluation before anything is ordered.
Before You Buy
The questions to settle before the cameras arrive.
The hardest part of a body worn video rollout is rarely the hardware. It is agreeing who is told, when the camera runs, how long the footage lives and who is allowed to open it. Teams that sort that out first tend to have a quiet deployment. Teams that sort it out after the first complaint tend not to.
Below are the questions worth putting in front of your legal, HR or work health and safety people early. They are questions, not answers. We supply the equipment and the system that manages the footage. What your organisation decides on each of these is yours to set.
Question 01
Who is told that recording may occur, and how are they told?
- Is it signage at the entry point, a line in the site induction, wording in an employment contract or position description, or some combination?
- Does the wording cover visitors and contractors as well as staff?
- Who keeps that wording current when the deployment changes, and who checks it is actually up on the wall?
Question 02
When does the camera run, and who makes that call?
- Does it record for the whole shift, or does the wearer start it at a defined point?
- If the wearer decides, what are the triggers, and what are they expected to say when they start recording?
- What happens when somebody asks the wearer to stop, and who backs that decision afterwards?
Question 03
How long is footage kept, and what triggers deletion?
- What is the retention period for an ordinary shift where nothing happened?
- What marks a recording as one to hold, who applies that mark, and what happens if nobody does?
- Is deletion automatic at the end of the period, or does somebody sign it off?
Question 04
Who can view, export or share footage, and how is that logged?
- Which roles see the whole library, which see only their own recordings, and which see nothing?
- Does an export or a share need a second person to approve it?
- Who reads the audit trail, how often, and what do they do with what they find?
Question 05
What happens when a member of the public asks for a copy?
- Who receives that request at the front line, and who is authorised to decide the answer?
- How quickly are you aiming to respond, and who writes the reply?
- What is your position when other people appear in the same recording?
Question 06
How does a complaint or incident review use the footage?
- Is footage pulled for every complaint, or only where the wearer or the complainant raises it?
- Is the wearer told when their footage is being reviewed, and do they get to see it?
- Will footage be used for performance management, and has that been said plainly to staff up front rather than discovered later?
Question 07
Does a union or enterprise agreement consultation process apply?
- Does an enterprise agreement, union arrangement or existing workplace policy already say something about monitoring or recording?
- Who needs to be consulted, and how far ahead of the first camera going out?
- Who owns that conversation, and where is the outcome recorded?
Digicom Wireless supplies body worn cameras and the system that manages the footage. We do not advise on surveillance or workplace privacy obligations, and nothing on this page is legal advice.
Surveillance and workplace privacy obligations are not uniform across Australia. They differ between states and territories, and they can differ again depending on your sector and on where the recording takes place. Confirm independently what applies to your organisation, through your own legal adviser or the relevant regulator, before you deploy, and again if you later change how, where or by whom the cameras are used.
Want to walk through how a deployment would actually run on your site?
Speak With a SpecialistHow these questions get answered varies a lot by sector. The law enforcement and security pages cover how those teams typically run body worn video alongside radio, and a free system evaluation is a sensible first step if you are still working out the scale of the rollout.
Where They Are Used
Body worn video, sector by sector.
Body worn cameras turn up wherever staff deal with the public and the account of what happened matters afterwards. What the footage is actually used for changes a lot between sectors, and so does the camera that suits. These guides cover how each sector runs its front line communications, and where body worn video fits alongside it.
Law Enforcement
A first hand record of stops, searches and arrests that can be produced later in a proceeding.
View Solutions
Security
What was said during a refusal, an ejection or a trespass warning, captured by the guard who was there.
View Solutions
Retail
Abuse at the service desk and theft stops on the floor, recorded rather than reconstructed from memory.
View Solutions
Hospitality
Refusals at the door, intoxication calls and gaming room incidents, with a record the licensee can rely on.
View Solutions
Transport
Fare disputes, boarding incidents and platform confrontations seen from the driver or revenue officer.
View Solutions
Government
Field officers and inspectors documenting site visits, compliance checks and public counter incidents.
View Solutions
Education
Campus security and after hours patrols, with a record of how an escalation at the gate was handled.
View Solutions
Facilities Management
Contractor access disputes and after hours callouts across a portfolio, with proof of what the site looked like.
View SolutionsAll Industries
Browse the full set of industry guides, including sectors not listed here.
View AllNot sure which of the three cameras suits your teams?
Get Expert AdviceFrequently Asked Questions
Body worn camera questions, answered plainly.
The questions Australian operations, security and work health and safety managers ask us before they commit to body worn video. Where a number has not been published, we say so rather than fill the gap.
How much do body worn cameras cost in Australia?
There is no single figure, and anyone who gives you one before asking about your operation is guessing. What drives the cost is which camera actually suits the wearer, how many wearers you have, the docking hardware needed to charge and offload them at changeover, and the VideoManager EX licensing that sits behind all of it, including whether you host it in the cloud or on your own servers. The number of user accounts and how long you hold footage move the licensing side as well. Because the licence is mandatory rather than optional, we quote the hardware and the system together, so you get one number instead of a price per camera that turns into three invoices later. Tell us the number of wearers, the sites and the shift pattern and we will scope it, or start with a free system evaluation.
Do we need a licence or subscription to run body worn cameras?
Yes. The Motorola V500, VB400 and V200 all run on VideoManager EX, and a licence or cloud subscription is mandatory. There is no offline mode that gets you around it, and none of the three can be handed out and left to run on their own. VideoManager EX is what assigns a camera to a named person, takes the footage off the dock, sets retention, controls who can view and export, and keeps the audit trail. It is also where the automatic recording trigger from a paired radio is configured, in the same way your radio system holds its emergency alarm management settings centrally. You can run it cloud hosted or install it on your own servers, and that choice usually comes down to your IT policy rather than the cameras. Budget the licence at the same time as the hardware, not after.
Can staff turn the cameras off?
That is a policy decision before it is a hardware one. How a camera behaves is set in the VideoManager device profile on the server rather than by the wearer changing settings on the unit, so whether the camera records for the whole shift or the wearer starts it at a defined point is something you configure centrally and can change later. What you cannot configure away is the conversation with your people about it. Decide who is told, what the wearer is expected to say when recording starts, and what happens when somebody asks them to stop, then write it down before the cameras go out. The questions worth settling first are set out earlier on this page, and they are the ones to put in front of your legal, HR and work health and safety people rather than answer on the floor.
How long is footage kept, and where is it stored?
For as long as your retention rules say. We will not quote you a period, because it is yours to set and it depends on your sector, your insurer and your own legal advice. Recordings come off the camera when it goes back in the dock and land in VideoManager EX, which is either cloud hosted or installed on your own servers, so the footage sits wherever you decided that platform sits. Inside it you set how long ordinary footage is held before it is removed, and which recordings are flagged to be kept beyond that because a complaint, claim or review is attached to them. It is the same discipline we apply to radio voice recording, and it is worth agreeing the rule before the first camera goes out rather than after the first request for footage.
Can body worn camera footage be used in a legal proceeding?
Whether a particular recording can be used, and on what terms, is a question for your own legal adviser. Digicom Wireless supplies the cameras and the system that manages the footage. We do not advise on surveillance or workplace privacy obligations, and nothing on this page is legal advice. What we can tell you is what tends to make footage worth having when somebody asks for it: the camera was assigned to a named person before the shift, the recording came off it through the dock rather than a laptop, access is set by role, and every action taken on the file is logged against the account that took it. That audit trail is the difference between a video file and something a reviewer can rely on. Teams whose footage is most likely to be produced later are covered on our law enforcement page.
Do body worn cameras work with our two way radios?
Yes, and it is the main reason operations teams buy the cameras from a radio supplier. All three cameras can be set to start recording automatically when a paired Motorola radio goes into an emergency state, over Bluetooth. Which radios are supported differs by camera. Motorola names MOTOTRBO, TETRA and APX for the V500. For the VB400 the supported list covers TETRA radios with Bluetooth and MR19 or later software, plus MOTOTRBO and APX radios with Bluetooth other than the APX6000 AN and APX7000. V200 support arrived with VideoManager release 26.2 and covers MOTOTRBO only, specifically the R5, R7, XPR 7000e and 5000e, DP3000e, DP4000e and DM4000e, with matching camera firmware. In every case the trigger is configured server side in the VideoManager device profile, and there is no pairing menu on the camera itself. Send us your two way radio fleet list with the model numbers and we will check it against the camera you are considering.
What is the difference between the Motorola V500 and the V200?
They are different classes of device, not two price points on the same camera. The V500 is the only one of the three with LTE, so it is the only one that live streams and offloads footage without WiFi, and it carries GPS along with GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS and SBAS. It records at 1920x1080p, is rated IP67 and MIL-STD-810H from -20C to +50C, holds 128 GB and runs 12 hours. The V200 is a front-line enterprise camera built for a shop floor, a ward or a venue. It records at 720p, is IP54 rather than IP67, is rated to +40C rather than +50C, has no satellite location at all, holds 64 GB and runs 9 hours continuous. It weighs 121.6 g and clips to a uniform shirt or hangs on a lanyard, which is exactly why it stays on people who would take a heavier camera off. Match the camera to the wearer rather than to the budget, and read the full specifications earlier on this page before you decide.
Can we hire body worn cameras rather than buy them?
Ask us, because it depends on the deployment and on the licensing behind it. Our hire fleet is built around digital two way radios, and short term radio hire for events, shutdowns and project work is something we do constantly. Body worn video works differently. The cameras cannot be handed out on their own, so a VideoManager EX licence has to be scoped for the period as well, and that is what decides whether hire, purchase or leasing is the sensible commercial model for you. If spreading the cost is the real question rather than the length of the deployment, leasing is often the better fit. Tell us how long you need the cameras and how many wearers are involved, and we will put the options in front of you.
How long does the battery last on a body worn camera?
It depends on the model. Motorola rates the V500 at 12 hours with a recharge in under 4 hours, the VB400 at up to 12 hours with a recharge in under 8 hours, and the V200 at 9 hours continuous with 5 months of standby and a recharge in under 5 hours. All three are built to cover a shift and go back in the dock, which charges the camera and offloads the footage in the same action. One thing worth knowing before you plan around spare cells: the VB400 battery is integral and not user serviceable. Motorola has not published a position on the V500 or the V200, so if swappable batteries matter to your roster, ask us and we will confirm it with Motorola before you order rather than guess in a quote.
What happens to footage when someone leaves the organisation?
Nothing happens to the footage, and that is the point. Once a camera has been docked, the recordings live in VideoManager EX under your control rather than on the device, so a wearer leaving does not take anything with them. The camera is unassigned and reissued to the next person, which on the V500 and VB400 docks is a matter of touching an RFID card to the dock at changeover. Their user account is removed, which ends their access to the library, while the audit trail of what they did while they had it stays intact. The retention rules you set continue to apply to their recordings exactly as before. Confirm early who removes accounts and how quickly, because that step is the one most often left with nobody's name against it, and it is worth writing into the same policy you agree before deployment.
Still working out which camera fits your team?Tell us who is wearing it, where they work and how many you need, and we will scope the cameras, the docks and the licensing together.
Speak With a SpecialistWho We Equip
The operations we put cameras on.
Body worn video is usually driven by an operations, security or work health and safety manager rather than by IT. These are the kinds of operation we scope it for most often, and the thing that decides the answer in each one.
Operation 01
Contract guarding and mobile patrols
Officers spread across client sites, single crew vehicles on an overnight run, and cameras signed out at the start of a shift and handed back at the end. The deciding question is usually whether footage has to leave the vehicle before the officer gets back. Scoped alongside the radio fleet we build for security teams.
Operation 02
Retail groups and supermarkets
Abuse at the service desk, theft stops on the floor, and staff who will simply take off anything heavy or awkward. Weight and mounting matter more than specifications here, and the policy has to read the same way in every store. See how we equip retail teams on the shop floor.
Operation 03
Hospitals, community health and care
Ward, reception and community staff dealing with aggression, often alone and often at night. The camera sits next to the duress path rather than replacing it, so we scope it with the emergency alarm management already running on site.
Operation 04
Licensed venues, clubs and hotels
Refusals at the door, intoxication calls and gaming room incidents, where the record matters to the licensee as much as to the staff member who was standing there. Docks live in the back office and cameras are pooled across shifts. Related to our hospitality communications work.
Operation 05
Transport operators and revenue protection
Fare disputes, boarding incidents and platform confrontations, seen from the officer rather than from a ceiling camera. Crews are spread across a network instead of one site, so where the footage offloads is the first thing to settle. Covered further on our transport page.
Operation 06
Councils and government field teams
Rangers, inspectors and public counter staff documenting site visits, compliance checks and the occasional confrontation that follows one. These deployments usually sit inside a procurement process that wants the licensing costed up front, which is how we quote it anyway. See our government page.
Next Step
Tell us who is wearing the camera and we will scope the rest
We will work through which of the three Motorola models suits your people, how many docks a shift changeover needs, and what the VideoManager EX licensing looks like cloud hosted or on premises. You get one quote covering the cameras, the docking and the system, rather than a price per camera and a surprise later.
If you would rather have the current setup reviewed before anything is ordered, ask for a free system evaluation. Digicom Wireless is a Motorola Solutions Platinum Channel Partner, based in Sydney and supplying sites across Australia.