CCTV Security Camera Guide

There are a few basics about CCTV security cameras when deciding to protect your home and family. CCTV cameras come in two forms. They are either CMOS or CCD cameras and are differentiated by the image sensor. CMOS based cameras are cheaper but produce a lower quality image than the CCD camera.

To find the best camera to fit your needs, the first step is to identify what purpose you intend the security camera to serve. For example, a camera to monitor general crowd movement is a much lower requirement than if you need a camera that can pinpoint a face in the crowd.

If the area you want to monitor is outdoors, there are requirements such as durability concerns that need to be address unlike an indoor security camera. There are factors such as weather and vandals that will test the durability of your camera.

The overall size of your security system, including the number of cameras you will need, will determine your spending ceiling. If it was just one camera you might spend a little extra for extra features, for example higher resolution. But across a 20 camera system that little extra you spend per camera will definitely add up to some serious money. Your budget will directly impact your buying decision and needs to be sufficient for the right cameras to adequately serve your needs.

The lighting in the area to be monitored by your security camera is another important consideration. A high quality camera designed for daytime use installed in a low light environment won't be able to render anything more than shades of black. If that is the case you will need flood lights or some other source of lighting in the area.

For nigh scenes, black and white cameras are recommended since they can deliver sharper images in low light settings. There are also day/night outdoor cameras with lighting sensors that adjust the camera for optimal recording at different lighting levels.

There are also night vision cameras for true low light recording. Take a look at the Lux rating. The lower the Lux rating the less light the camera requires. Cameras with a Lux rating of 0 are designed for complete darkness.

The resolution of a camera is the measure of image sharpness that the security camera can capture. A higher resolution camera can produce higher quality images. Lower end cameras come in resolutions of 330 lines and up while higher quality cameras have up to 400 lines.

When it comes to recording the video feed from the camera, most people will do with the DVR, which stands for digital video recorder. In more advanced monitoring systems there are controls for panning and zooming the camera in real-time to get closeups or follow a particular object.

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Network Security Camera Systems

When it comes to installing and maintaining a security camera system, wouldn't you like remote accessibility, higher image quality, flexibility, easy integration, scalability, cost effectiveness? These are some of the biggest advantages a network security camera system offers that a traditional analog system just cannot provide.

Someone could access, manage, and view live and recorded video from anywhere around the world with an internet connection. Network security systems these days are also referred to as IP-based networks because the communicate over the network using the Internet Protocol, which is the same thing as your office network that you can connect to from virtually anywhere, anytime through the internet.

This makes it possible to outsource the monitoring of the surveillance to a third-party person or security firm. The third-party security firms usually are the people who will manage, install and fix the entire system if you bought it from them and can remotely diagnose problems as well.

Analog camera systems cannot be remotely accessed and require someone onsite to do the monitoring, viewing and managing of video unless additional equipment was installed which essentially would make it a hybrid analog/digital network system. The equipment required would be something like a video encoder.

Network security cameras offer progressive scan and megapixel technology that analog cameras cannot. With the digital technology, these cameras produce much clearer images and higher resolution. Also, digital images do not degrade like traditional analog video data would.

Speaking of degradation, transportation of the video over an IP-based network does not degrade digital video. But analog signals degrade over distance when transported across analog cables. In the case of analog systems with upgraded digital recorders, the image still needs to be recorded in analog format, converted to digital for the camera, transported in analog form, and then converted once more to be recorded digitally. All that converting degrades the video quality just a little bit. It's best to minimize the degradation by using a full digital system.

Another benefit of a network security camera is that the cameras can be placed and networked from anywhere that has a wireless signal, or a nearby network port. It can also be removed much more cleanly than an analog camera which needs an individual cable directly from the camera to the source of recording.

As a video security system grows and cameras are added or removed, the internal infrastructure very flexible to accommodate the systems needs. It helps that all network security products are built to a standard so any of the products can easily be integrated into the system.

For these reasons, it's just much more cost effective. Which in itself is another reason analog systems are losing favor to digital network security systems. Management of the hardware is a breeze compared to the cumbersome analog system. And as wireless technology advances and becomes cheaper, analog equipment are slowly beginning to fade into obsolesce.