As home security moves forward in the digital age, it is only natural that explosive growth has surrounded digital security camera systems.
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.
The digital nature of these new cameras, however, makes is possible to do so much more than analog security camera systems could ever do. Digital CCTV cameras and systems offer much more advanced combinations of recording power as I explain below.
How it works
By installing a surveillance capture card in your computer, you turn your computer into a digital video recorder. This gives you the highest quality video compression as well as the lowest storage requirement. The video output from your digital security camera is digitized, making possible an impressive array of benefits.
Digital Recording 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 program your digital surveillance camera to record in only specific situations, or ignore other situations completely. For example, you can program the system to stop recording when no movement is detected in a cameras field of vision. You can even program your system to email, phone, or text you a 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 multiple camera systems, you can program your digital surveillance cameras to alert another cameras to pan over to its area for another view of some unusual activity. You can control all these actions of your cameras manually, in real time, while viewing the video recordings from your computer, as well. You are only ever limited by the software and hardware you decide to purchase.
Drawbacks
Digital CCTV systems, however, are not totally without drawback. The files generated by computer security cameras can fill up hard drive space quickly. That, however, is where you’ll find the ability to program your cameras to stop recording in certain situations comes in handy. By avoiding recording the vast majority of time, when nothing worth recording is happening, you’ll find that you save a tremendous amount of disk space.
Is a digital security camera right for you?
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.