Phones nowadays have cameras that are so perfect in quality, yet security cameras are mostly always so grainy so why? You can get a phone with a perfect extremely high quality camera for a few hundred these days, sometimes even less
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Higher resolution equals large file sizes. Have you ever recorded an overnight video on your phone? Try it and see how many gigabytes it consumes. Security cameras need to have good enough resolution to fulfil their basic function (identity if a person is breaking in etc.) but still keeping data storage as small as possible.
It depends on when they were installed. If a company spent a lot on video security 10 or 15 years ago they may not be in a hurry to replace it just because technology has improved.
It’s probably due to space constrictions. Phone cameras when they take a video may take up like 20 to 100 megabytes for a minute or two. But security camera are constantly taking video 24/7 and they need to store that video for maybe a week or two so overtime they need a lot more storage.
On top of that that, the reason pictures from phones look so good because they use a lot more pixels to make that image, more pixels used for an image so therefore more space is needed. Vice versa with less pixels needing less space but that produces a more grainy picture. So security cameras are probably more grainy because they use less pixels per second of video to save on space.
they should invent a system with two cameras per housing. one standard grainy video cam for always-recording action to keep video files small, and a nice hi-res photo camera next to it to take super-detailed color images every few seconds
Used to do security at a department store. 24 cameras all recording 24/7 and you have to store all recordings for 30 days. That is a lot of storage. Thats why they’re so shitty. Just 1 hour of 1080p footage is 1.4 GB.
It’d be neat to incorporate smart software. The camera could record in high def all the time, but it’s erased if the software doesn’t find anything useful in the recording. If it works, you’d be left with only HD events records. You’d have the storage for it assuming you don’t have hours of eventful data.
They don’t need to be high quality. They only need to record. I don’t know about high crime areas, but at my job, my low quality cameras did the job very well on most cenarios. I had to prove a employee was stealing money, had to prove a client didn’t leave her purse at my store when she acused my employees of stealing it, that another employee didn’t steal things in the locker of a coworker. All those cases I only needed to recognize the person (usually by clothes or other traits) and general shapes of things. My shitty cameras installed 8years ago did the job, why spend money in the upgrade?
That said, some security cameras do have high resolution. Again, because of work, I was in the security room of an airport once and boy. Thoses babies are built to clearly zoom in your face and are installed like 4 meters high. They also overlap with other cameras so they can have more than an angle at any time. The specific thing I was there to review had 5 angles, all high quality.
But again, cameras in your grocery store that are frequently in not that well lit areas? Those are there to detter minor things and to build in evidence provided by the statements of involved people.
It depends on how old the system is. We recently replaced a system I was installed in 2012. The cameras for that system or a model that have been around for a couple years already so figure what your cell phone camera looked like in 2009.
Our newest system records high definition. Of course it has to be set to keep everything in relative focus. It doesn’t know what you want to focus on and it’s possible there are a dozen things under the need focused on at the same time. That means everything’s a little bit blurry.
We record high quality video but when it comes time to get it out of the system we don’t always export as high quality. I recently saved some video of what could have potentially been a kidnapping of a child by his grandmother and non-custodial father as part of a difficult divorce. The camera was mounted 20 ft up and covering areas that were up to 150 ft away. 15 minutes of video was 140 mb compressed. It’s common to export really low quality versions to pass around for information, but then export the really high quality if it’s needed for any court proceedings. That version is more tamper-resistant.
I’m sure that if you set your phone camera to recording video and then mounted it up on a wall for an entire day you would not see the high quality you expect.
Barring most places security is in place to ensure insurance companies are satisfied, this means they have to be good enough, but not great.
So let’s say you are a store owner, you want one camera on the door, another on the till. You have a choice, pay $75 for each camera and get an image of a grainy lower resolution or spend $150 and get a clearer image. You also need the storage device, you’re going to need big memory for 24/7 365 and 2 year retention. If you go with the cheaper lower grade cameras, you also have less data, maybe you save money here too, but those $150 cameras are going to create higher data consumption.
So, do you want to spend $1000, or want to spend $500?
What purpose are your cameras serving? Well we want to be able to show the insurance company proof we were robbed, we want to show the clerk followed protocols, and we want to give police a general idea of who they’re looking for if they did a patrol immediately after the robbery.
The cheaper camera picks up the suspect is male, white, about 6″ on reference to the shelving, wearing a red jacket, jeans, and white shoes, at 10:58pm he pointed a gun at the clerk who emptied the till, put the money in something and handed it over, thief then runs out at 10:59pm heading left out the door
The expensive camera picks up the suspect is male, white, 6″2, wearing a dark red Adidas Jacket, Blue jeans with a black belt, looking baggy, white reebok sneakers, he has a small moustache,he enters the store at 10:58 and pulls a black gun concealed in his jacket, the clerk empties the till into a white plastic bag with a Chinese food restaurant name on the side, the thief runs out the door at 10:59 heading left out the door.
Either way, the police are getting told to look for a white male, 6″ thereabouts, wearing a red jacket, blue jeans, maybe carrying the bag, but maybe stashed in a pocket, also armed, and last seen heading westward up King Street.
Either way the insurance company sees you were in fact robbed, and had proper measures qualifying your claim. Why would you spend the extra $500 for fancier cameras if you got the similar results?
Some cameras just need to show whether a person Si somewhere they shouldn’t be, it doesn’t matter identifying the person.
Some cameras are just meant to indicate there’s a truck at the gate, identifying themselves through an intercom.
Some cameras are just there to monitor equipment, you don’t need high end footage to see a room filling with smoke or a transformer sparking.
Some cameras are just there to ensure a door is closed when it should be, or monitor traffic in and out of an area.
It’s not always about getting a high quality image of someone’s face, or license plate, when a basic camera is good enough.
Walmart has invested in a mighty fine system. I watch (too much) ID tv and the detail they pick up on folks buying their murder supplies is phenomenal. And the stalkers, it captures their faces with clarity. I’m torn on whether this is an endorsement to shop at Walmart or an inducement to stay away.
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