Can You Use a PIR Camera As A CCTV Camera Or Just Use CCTV Cameras?
Can You Use a PIR Camera As A CCTV Camera – Can you use a PIR camera instead of a CCTV camera? No – and not just no, hard no. As to whether we’d use a PIR camera or a CCTV camera we think this proposes a false dichotomy – we’d use both.
As regular SEN readers know, we like PIR cameras – in fact we love them. We think every sensor possible should dish up a few frames of video each time it activates. How many frames? We think 3 frames is good and one frame is miles better than nothing at all.
The beauty of a PIR camera is that it lets you see what activated the sensor a few seconds later. It might be a wombat, or a kangaroo, or a spider web blowing in a draft, or a sudden change in light, or that moment the sun comes through the curtains and hits the lens just so at the same time of day in the month of June.
The trouble with PIR cameras is that while they are great for verification of alarms, and they allow recognition and even identification in the right conditions, the resolution is modest. This means pixel peeping is impossible, and long-term event storage is typically modest, too.
You’ll also find that when you use elevated resolution settings the cascades of events that typify genuine intrusions can flood a hub, especially if there are 2 or 3 people running around a site at the same time. Flooding the hub’s ability to transmit images from multiple triggered sensors via modest internal wireless pathways means the speed that alarm event images are updated slows right down, impacting on response.
Worse is when 2 or 3 people decide to prance about in front of the same sensor for 10 minutes – this can cause a sensor cache and/or local wireless comms element to overload. When this happens, the sensor might unilaterally decide its camera portion needs a 24-hour holiday. You will still get intrusion events but no images.
For installers who carefully overlap their zones – and we’re sure this means every one of you – one flooded sensor is not the end of the world. You’ll still get recognition and a register of alarm events from other sensors en route of march. But even so, flooding can mean you don’t get to see pivotal moments you really wanted to see in a specific area of coverage.
CCTV cameras are different beasts altogether and when paired with appropriate storage systems and running simple AI rules that detect people or vehicles, they will capture very high-resolution images for a very long time. You can programme cameras to store many minutes of live footage before and after an event – this gives the necessary context investigators always want.
And CCTV cameras – even if they are running at 30 or 60 images per second – are not going to choke on a diet of video their processing engines are fully optioned to sense, convert, process, and pass on to NVRs, switches, hubs or what-have-you via their 8-lane Cat-6 highways.
You obviously need to choose a decent camera with solid low light performance or supporting luminaries – warm white or IR – to get through the 24-hour cycle without holes in your coverage, but what comes out the tailpipe of the most modest CCTV camera is streets ahead of the grainy images you’ll get from the most carefully optioned PIR camera.
So, what would SEN do? We’d install CCTV cameras and PIR cameras, and we’d overlap the angles of view of both kinds of sensor as far we possibly could.
You can learn more about a good low light CCTV camera here or read more SEN news here.
Can You Use a PIR Camera As A CCTV Camera Or Just Use CCTV Cameras?
Can You Use a PIR Camera As A CCTV Camera?
