How Can a Digital Security Camera Benefit You?
Steve Dale
As home security moves forward in the digital age, it is only natural that explosive growth has surrounded digital security camera systems.
Digital security cameras play much the same role that their analog counterparts in 1960s and '70s closed circuit TVs (CCTV) played. Mounted in strategic locations, they enable the owners to monitor whatever areas 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 Digital CCTV works
By installing a video capture card in your PC or Mac, you turn your computer into a DVR (digital video recorder). This gives you high quality digital video compression straight onto your computer's hard disk. The digital video output from your surveillance camera provides an impressive array of benefits.
Digital Recording Benefits
Perhaps the most popular feature is the ability to view live and recorded video remotely from any computer or 3rd generation cell phone anywhere in the world. All you need to do is log in to your secure, private system and view what's going on right from your computer or phone.
Another powerful feature of your digital CCTV system is the ability to easily search your recorded video feed. Rather than rewinding and fast forwarding through videotape to find the time or event you want to view, you can navigate right to that point in the recording.
With computer software you can program your digital CCTV camera to include or exclude certain movement or images. For example, you can program it to stop recording when no movement is captured after a set period of time, or to excluded movement with part of a camera's field of vision. When movement is detected you could program your system to send you an text or email. This would be great, for example, if a camera detects movement inside your garage or home when you are away.
With systems that contain more than one camera, you could even program your digital CCTV cameras so that one camera alerts another camera to pan over to its angle for another look of some unusual activity that the first camera has detected. The limit of what you can control is only limited by a camera's features and the computer software that you are managing your system with.
Drawbacks of Digital Security Cameras
Digital surveillance systems, however, are not totally completely without drawbacks. The files generated by computer security cameras can fill up hard disk drive space very quickly. That, however, is where you'll find the ability to program your cameras to stop recording in certain situations comes in handy (time-lapsed recording). By avoiding recording the vast majority of time (when there is nothing worth recording!), you'll find that you save a 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.
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