I can’t think of a reason why other than the cost but surely it’s worth the potential to solve more crime
In: 67
It’s not the price of the cameras it’s the price of the storage. A LOT of security systems have perfectly fine cameras but compress the video for storage because it’s a lot of video to store for months on end. Not as common now but in the old days they would actually store multiple camera angles on one frame of video on VHS, Beta, or whatever.
The main reason is that many locations and especially governments have rules for how much data must be retained. Like how many years.
So even though the camera is capable, they dumb down the recording quality to meet the pointless retention time requirement.
High resolution video is not linear in terms of data storage. 2x the resolution is 4x the storage. Useful security video is almost always stitched from multiple POVs. How many angles do you need to cover any possible position for a crime to happen? A lot! Every new angle and each increment better resolution results in HUGE storage requirements. None of this video generates income for the business, 99% of it is never even reviewed. It’s simply not worth the capital expense to have every inch of store in detail monitored for petty crimes. Even then, you’d pay someone to watch the video, report crime, hire a lawyer to prosecute, wait months for legal system to work its process and finally be compensated back the original amount. Insurance covers any large loss events which is more affordable and easier to be compensated than prosecuting individuals.
So ultimately, taking a loss on a small fraction of lentils revenue from theft is actually the more cost-effective model than preventing 100% of thefts
In addition to the storage consideration and trying to balance resolution/storage/cost, you generally try to have a mix in a good system. You have cameras positioned to capture the general activity (e.g just generally monitoring the car park, or being able to see what’s going on in the back yard). You then have higher resolution cameras trying to catch more detail at key points such as for cars coming into a property, near doors etc. that way you hopefully can get the ‘big picture’ of what’s going on and capture sufficient detail on one of the higher resolution cameras to capture an image that’s good enough for identification. The camera zone should generally overlap a little so you can track the activity from one camera to the next.
Because you are buying cheap cameras
Helpful advice:
Buy a camera and DVR/NVR that is capable of handling a resolution of over 6mp
I install these systems and am seeing alot of mixed answers here.
Companies are cheap.
Cameras are a deterrent not a solution
Insurance is a solution not a deterrent
Insurance requires a minimum deterrent for a discount on premiums.
I install systems that cost $500 to $2 Million. With cameras you get exactly what you pay for. 99% of the time people don’t pay for the storage of an appropriate size and that’s the main issue so they have to sacrifice framerate (amount of pictures taken per second) and/or resolution (how detailed the photo is)
Also to everyone saying the systems are recording 24/7 spoiler almost every modern server based system isn’t. They record via Motion,Analytic Event,Time of day. And newer tech doesnt even save the whole picture just the parts that changed (H.265/H.264) But even still take alot of storage.
To put it in perspective of how MUCH storage I built an array a year ago the saved 400 cameras worth of footage 60 days of motion only storage (avg 10 hours active per day) took 1.5 PetaBytes of storage over 8 servers. Let that sink in for a moment on cost as most server drives for larger recorders are 10TB – 16TB individual drives. That array was 112 16TB drives over $28,000 just in magnetic storage. Not even the hardware they’re mounted in.
How far away from the target is your camera? I have 4K CCTV cameras but the fact they are 30ft up in the air pointing at a door that is 40ft away means the clarity of the thing you are looking at isn’t great and you can’t clearly see someone’s face.
What i have seen the reasons in here are
1. The cameras are usually old and even if they were good when installed, the definition of good has changed
2. The cost. There are hundreds of cameras in a medion size building, and it would get really expencive to get good cameras.
3. The storage. Storing a month of 4k video takes a lot of space. Them being still helps to compress the video because you can just take a backround picture and only store moving objects, but thats still a lot. So you have to choose to either keep good quality video for a short time or bad quality for a longer time.
4. There is no need for good quality, because the precense of cameras is enough most times and from the rest bad quality video is good enough most of the time. Its really rare to actually need hight quality video
I have a 6x 4k camera security system in my new (to me) home that the previous owners set up. It’s so dumb, it has like a day of storage and you can’t even make out any detail anyways.
Its not always. Some cameras have high resolution.
The main reason why CCTVs has crappy quality is compression. It takes a lot of storage to keep this much of video. For example cheapest recorder will have at least 4 camera support which means in generates 96 hours of video per day and that video needs to be kept for some time, like a week or two so it can be retrieved if needed.
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