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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There is an additional problem that exacerbates this. In many organizations (esp. govt.) IF you install a security camera, it MUST retain at least one year of video.
Well… a year is a long time, so to meet this requirement you can either have tons of storage (which still might not be enough if you have multiple cameras) or you lower the quality until a year fits on the system you got.
Most people do the latter.
Higher resolution means more data is being recorded
For security cameras to serve their function, all this data needs to be saved, with it generally being useful to save data for longer periods of time (up to a point, there’s a bit of a trade off here)
More data being saved means you need more storage
Data storage costs money
Therefore higher resolution can add up quick cost-wise
This means for a given security budget, you can spend it on higher resolution, more cameras for better coverage, or longer retention of the recordings, or some mixture of those. This means lower resolution can mean you can save the recordings for longer or that you can have more cameras for better coverage so fewer things happen outside the scope of the cameras you have.
It’s basically just a cost balancing act in a situation where you have a finite budget
I assume for some places it’s mainly for show because your insurance might be cheaper if you “have surveillance cameras” so you just get some cheap ones. Not 100% sure although I swear I have heard this from somewhere.
Modern CCTV cameras have a good quality image, even cheap ones.
Usually people or companies are still using very old technology and are so cheap into upgrading to something better. For me at least, I haven’t seen in a long time CCTVs records in a poor quality and I am in this industry.
Would a higher quality sensor overheat if constantly recording? I borrowed someone’s dSLR that had video and it could only take 2-5 minute clips before stopping recording due to overheating.
I used to work for a producer of specialized ingredients, all made from fish products, and we had 12 cameras for 200k square feet place. We had to keep I believe 1080p recordings from all cameras for 90 or 270 days, depending on area, and that needed its own server room
The cameras are fine, it’s the recording that people choose to compress so they save money on storage
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