What to consider when purchasing a home or office CCTC system
- sam7142
- Oct 14, 2020
- 3 min read
Finding a reliable company to install your CCTV system professionally can be difficult, not only due to the fact you don’t know who you’re working with but because you may not know what you are buying too. This is why we are providing you with some of the key information here, to help you better understand CCTV systems.
If you’re currently looking into CCTV installation for either your home or office and you want to know the options that are available to you, then this article is for you. We’ll highlight some important aspects to you to consider before making that all-important purchase.
Whether you are looking to secure your home or office with a CCTV system, you’ll need a CCTV camera and system you can trust, and that is easy to use.
The problem is that there is so much choice available that we often don’t have the time to investigate different systems on the market thoroughly and we end up instead choosing to buy the first camera we see to save time.
Well, that stops today!
What should you consider before purchasing a CCTV system?
Whatever the reasons behind you wanting to install a home or office CCTV system, you should consider first whether you need internal or external cameras. Perhaps you’ll decide you require both – there is no right or wrong answer as it all depends on your personal circumstances. What is it you want to protect, and where will the cameras need to be to see it?
You’ll also think about where you will store footage gathered by the cameras – you could choose a hard drive on your property or in the cloud.
Storing footage in the cloud can be beneficial because you can access it from any location whereas, if the footage is on your hard drive, you may need to be in the same room as your computer to access it. Also, if you are unable to locate the hard drive, it breaks, or it’s stolen, you’ll most likely have an issue with recovering footage if you didn’t have copies stored in the cloud.
Many CCTV systems now give you the ability to receive notifications and watch live footage via your mobile phone. This is perfect if you want to be able to see what is happening at certain times or if you just want the peace of mind that everything is okay; perhaps you are on holiday, or you want to see what the kids or your staff are up to in your absence.
With this ability, if anything bad ever does happen like as a burglary or fire and you happened to check the live footage, you could act immediately by calling the police or fire brigade. It’s not just burglaries you can use CCTV to monitor.
You can now select cameras that will let you watch live footage of your home from anywhere in the world and that have speakers, so your can be heard by the people in your home or office at the time.
One other important factor to consider is camera resolution. If you buy a home or office CCTV system which records pictures at a resolution lower than 720P, you’ll struggle to see important details such as faces. If you wanted to give the footage to police as evidence for a crime that had taken place, low-resolution footage wouldn’t be sharp enough to help convict the person who burgled your house or damaged your property.
The resolution of your recording isn’t the only important factor though. If you choose the wrong frame rate, you may struggle to view details in your recordings. You should aim to buy a camera that records at 15 frames per second so that movements and events captured on the footage look natural.
If you want footage that shows events unfold in ‘real-time’, you should choose a system which films and records at 25 frames per second. Be careful though because many budget cameras do not give you an option to manually adjust which frame rate to use.
If your aim is to capture important details such as people’s faces, a rate of 12 to 15 fps will be suitable. You can, of course, set it higher to something like 30 fps but if you choose a hard drive to store the recordings on, the storage will reach capacity far quicker because it’s recording so much more information per second
Comentarios