Evaluating your CCTV needs

Before starting to compare systems or choose potential vendors, sit down and consider your CCTV needs carefully.

First, consider what you want to monitor: General comings and goings? Vehicles? Do you want to see faces, merchandise, crowds? Once you decide what you want to see, choosing CCTV components becomes easier.

Next, decide what picture quality you need. Quality can refer to both how detailed the image is and how fast the frame rate is. Frame rate is simply a measure of how many individual pictures make up the video. “Full motion,” what you see on television and on VHS tapes, is 30 frames per second, or fps. Most often, CCTV systems record at slower rates, which result in more jerky-looking images but saves tape or hard drive space, allowing longer periods of time to be recorded.

Think about how your CCTV system will be monitored. Will you simply record at all times, and only review the tape when a problem occurs? Or will you have a dedicated employee watching for trouble? Also, with multiple cameras, you have the option of connecting each to its own monitor, or combining multiple images onto one monitor.

You should also decide whether your priority is to deter potential crimes or to catch perpetrators. Both can be important, but your priority will influence your purchasing decisions. If you are more interested in deterring certain activities, large, visible cameras are your best bet. Trying to catch criminals on tape without them being aware of it requires hidden cameras, which cost more both for hardware and for installation. If your monitoring target is internal, you run the added cost of having to hide and secure the recorder and monitor as well.