Most Important Qualities Of A CCTV Camera For Security Applications.

Most Important Qualities Of A CCTV Camera – The most important qualities of a CCTV camera for security applications depend on what the camera is being used for.

But as a baseline a camera needs to deliver realistic colour, good performance in backlight and falling light, allow useful digital zoom into a good depth of field, and deliver the operational results it was installed to deliver day and night, 365 days a year.

A security camera might be used for real time situational awareness supported by security patrols and operators wielding high resolution PTZs, but more often it will be used as a post-event forensic tool. This second use case demands higher performance in our opinion, given a poor performing camera delivers situational awareness and not a great deal more.

Most Important Qualities Of A CCTV Camera

Other major variables are going to relate to the angle of view selected during commissioning, given this will impact on pixel spread (DORI performance), and aperture, with a knock-on effect on amplification noise and IR intervention.

A camera used for investigation needs to provide a well-compressed, high-quality image stream to meet its operational priorities. In an area under surveillance, you ideally want multiple angles of the same scene with different focal lengths offering different levels of detail. For example, wide angle to show activity across the scene and longer focal lengths for face recognition at points of best ambient light.

Considering face and numberplate capture as operational imperatives, image clarity, which combines a camera’s contrast, colour rendition, low light and backlight performance, as well as resistance to motion blur, might be the most important qualities a camera can have from a security operations’ perspective.

Resistance to motion blur is primarily a factor of shutter speed but some cameras manage to do better at the lowest default shutter speed settings of 1/25th or 1/30th of a second commonly seen. Tone mapping can also play into blur, but so can features that reduce data load by automatically painting parts of the scene which are not changing.

Most Important Qualities Of A CCTV Camera

All this underscores that in low light digital rebuilding of high-resolution images stressed by elevated ISO increases frame-by-frame processing latency, resulting in loss of raw data in the form of light reflected from fast moving objects passing through the scene. A low quality camera system won’t be able to keep up with changes taking place in its angle of view. The higher the resolution of the sensor, the more important processing efficiency becomes.

Camera system processing capability is a vital aspect of IP camera performance that must be considered during the selection process. Making selection harder is the fact different camera models from the same manufacturer can be of significantly different capability.

Sharpness, meanwhile, often relates more to lens choice and focal length selection than it does to camera selection if resolution, WDR and low light performance are the same. You used to be able to see this when you swapped out a low-quality lens for a high-quality lens – the performance difference was almost always staggering.

Given most cameras are sold as turrets, domes or bullets these days, it’s much harder to assess how good modern lenses are, but given the common price points we’d suggest typical plastic lens quality isn’t great.

While in photography you can select a lens for a task based on its character, in CCTV applications attributes like speed, sharpness, colour rendition, and resistance to ghosting and veiling flare are going to be more important but far harder to assess. Can you take lens quality into account when selecting modern cameras? Yes, but it’s going to mean a more expensive overall buy.

The latest cameras also need to be capable of supporting VCA applications, including recognition of humans and vehicles among many others. Better camera performance overall means better analytics performance. Analytics applications like weapons detection have minimum performance specifications that aren’t met by a 99-dollar turret camera.

When it comes to installations, camera angle helps with performance – head-on shots work best for ID and are more resistant to motion blur. That means camera adjustabiity is important when it comes to achieving the ideal angle of view, especially with bullets.

All these qualities and more need to be delivered to budget, and you need to have a back end and a networking, telecommunications, recording and management solution that makes expected performance deliverable.

Techs also need to juggle user expectations. This may be harder than anticipated, especially if they’ve priced the same low cost dome for ambient light on the high street and the user suddenly notices the gloomy depths in their night club.

What are the most important qualities of a CCTV camera? We’d argue they are a balance of performance, price, cybersecurity, comms, build quality, ease of integration and more.

Something to note is that the images we are using in this story are from an Axis camera that’s nearly 10 years old and has its Zipstream set high. It’s performing better than a modern turret camera, in my opinion.

Maximise these skimpy 120kb images and see what you think. The image is a bit more saturated than we’re used to seeing from a modern Axis camera, but the depth of field is oddly cavernous at these file sizes.

You can also see here that Fujinon’s high quality CCTV lenses and cameras have merged into a single product. This tells us something about how much the market cares for lense quality these days – nowhere near as much as it should.

As always, there’s more SEN news right here.

“Most Important Qualities Of A CCTV Camera For Security Applications.”