Advice When Purchasing Home & Business Kits

When purchasing a Home CCTV camera kit you have the option to purchase IP or Analog cameras and recorders.

The difference between both kits is one is digital and one is not. The digital option allows you to digitally zoom in on recorded images to a higher degree than you would achieve using analogue.

With analogue HD kits you can still zoom in on live and recorded images but not as good as digital, however, HD analogue cameras have come a long way over the last few years and now offer 5-megapixel cameras at by far lower prices than Ip cameras systems, but there is a downside to this as with IP cameras they are powered by POE from the recorder itself transmitting 12vdc power to the camera and video from the camera back to the recorder on one single cat 5 or cat 6 cables.

As with analogue, you would have to run in some cases a separate cable for power to each camera powered by a 12vdc supply normally located at the recording location. In some instances, you can run power and video down one cat5 cable using a balun for the transfer of video data and power using male and female power connectors.

This can work well but in some isolated cases you can get interference caused by power cables in attack spaces etc where the cables have crossed, this is because the cat 5 cables are not protected against earth issues. Therefore it might be worth considering running an RG59 coaxial cable when installing Analog HD cameras and running the power separately using a shotgun cable which is one cable that has coaxal and power built-in.

Recording

As a rule of thumb on one terabyte, the hard disk will approximately deliver 30 days of recording per one single camera, therefore, it is important to remember this when purchasing a new camera system.

For example, let’s say you require a four-way camera system for your home or business and you are looking for a recording period of one month, then you will need to order a four terabyte hard drive for your recorder however if you feel you only need a recording period of 14 days then you would require a two terabyte hard disk.

Motion detection recording

There is one other option you have you could install a one terabyte hard dist as this can give you recodings over a period of one month when the recorder has been placed in motion alarm mode.

How this works is when someone walks past or towards your cameras the camera will instantly start recording until the motion ends. Whereas the previous methods record constantly.

Wireless CCTV Kits

With wireless CCTV camera kits, the video will be transmitted without the need for wires, however, bear in mind that you still have to provide 12vdc to each camera location. Therefore Wireless is not always the cheapest option after taking into consideration the time it may take to put in place power at each camera point.

As mentioned previously the option of a cable may work out better than wireless from the signal point of view and less chance of distortion on signals in some cases we have witnessed. For advice please call our support team

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