It is important to carefully consider the location of your surveillance cameras. While you may think you have all the areas, you also need to make sure your cameras are close enough to the potential action to capture pictures that identify people and vehicles.
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CCTV cameras are quite an effective deterrent to thieves and robbers. They are also useful after the fact in helping to identify criminals, but only if you position them correctly so that they are close enough to get a good picture of a face or license plate. Otherwise, you will only receive basic information about people and vehicles.
Here are some tips to keep in mind for your CCTV system so that you not only capture activity but hopefully some useful information for the police.
Make sure your cameras can record high quality video
Most modern security cameras advertise 1080p HD recording, which is great, but that’s only one factor in video quality. You also want your cameras to have as many megapixels as you can afford.
On consumer Wi-Fi cameras like the Nest Cam or Amazon Cloud Cam, you won’t necessarily be able to control the video quality (apart from the Low, Medium, and High settings). However, if you are buying a wired network camera, many of them advertise megapixels.
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For example, this system from Ezviz has 3 megapixel cameras that record at 1080p, but this camera from Hikvision is a 4 megapixel model and records at the same 1080p resolution. You’ll even find higher megapixel cameras that can record over 1080p, like this one from Dahua, which is a 6MP model with 3072×2048 resolution.