How Can a Digital Security Camera Benefit You?
As home and business security moves into the next generation, it can only be expected that the growth of digital CCTV camera systems would explode.
Digital surveillance cameras play a very similar role to their analog counterparts that have been around since the sixties. Mounted in strategic locations, they enable the owner to monitor areas that are otherwise vulnerable in a home or business.
Their digital nature, however, makes many things possible that analog cameras never could do. Digital security cameras and digital security camera systems offer perhaps the most powerful combination of abilities available in any type of home or business security system.
How it works
By installing a video capture card in your PC, you turn your computer into an advance digital video recording system, otherwise known as a DVR. This enables you to record super-high quality digital video direct to the hard drive of your computer. The video output from your digital CCTV camera is referred to as a digitized recording that gives you an impressive array of features and benefits.
Benefits
One of the most popular features is the ability to view live streaming images from a computer or cell phone anywhere in the world. You gain access to your cameras and recordings by logging into your system by a secure username and password over the internet.
Another great feature of your digital surveillance system is the ability to easily search your recorded video data. Rather than the long and boring process of rewinding and fast forwarding through a VCR tape to find a specific date and time, you can navigate right to that point in the recording with digital video.
You can even program your digital security camera to focus specifically on some situations that it sees and ignore others. For example, you can program it to stop recording when nothing is moving in its field of vision, or record with reduced resolution. You can program it to notice and send you an email or phone notification if something that is supposed to be there is missing, or notify you if it detects something that isn’t supposed to be there.
With multi-camera systems, you can even program your digital security cameras so that one camera alerts another camera to pan over to its area for another view of some unusual activity that the first one has detected. And you can also control all these actions of your cameras manually, in real time, while viewing the video feed from your computer, as well.
Drawbacks
Digital surveillance systems are not completely without their drawbacks. The files generated onto your computer’s hard disk by your security cameras can quickly fill up a hard drive. However, hard disk storage these days are very cheap, so it is wise to install the biggest hard disk you can afford. Also, the ability to program your cameras to stop recording when no movement is detected will save you huge amounts of hard disk space.
So is a digital CCTV camera right for your home or business?
Digital CCTV cameras certainly offer you much more flexibility than an analog system by including a great array or powerful features. And they offer these things with the convenience of being able to monitor your digital camera system from anywhere in the world. If you’re looking for a top-notch high tech system to protect your business or home, a digital CCTV system is definitely one that I would recommend.