Both color and black and white
cameras are available for monitoring. Cameras are available in
fixed or remotely controlled models. Color cameras while providing a more
attractive display and sometimes needed color recognition may not be best for
all applications. Even though great advances have been made in color
cameras especially in sensitivity to low light situations, black and white is
still best for many applications. Besides the obvious cost factor black
and white cameras often provide the increased detail and contrast
required for security monitoring. Since the best type does vary by
application depend on
us to recommend what will work best for you.
You can have remote
control of many camera functions
remotely. Using a camera with pan, tilt and zoom ability you can zoom in on a license plate on a car in the parking
lot. You can pan the camera back and forth across a warehouse. You
can tilt the camera up or down. You can even program a pattern for a
particular camera to follow utilizing the pan tilt, and zoom functions to cover
a large area with one camera.
There are many monitoring
options for your system. A monitor can cycle from one
camera to the next or show multiple cameras at once. When you need to
monitor more than one camera at a time use a multiplexer to display many cameras
on one monitor. A multiplexer can also prepare the signal from multiple
cameras to be recorded on one VCR. It can also be designed to show
preference in displaying or recording the areas that have motion within
the camera's field of view. Alarm points could be
installed to cause a system to switch to a camera on a particular door when it
is opened. A moveable camera can also zoom in on a area when needed
automatically.
The venerable time
lapse VCR has been and still is a standard piece of equipment in most CCTV
applications. However it is rapidly being replaced by digital recorders
which do not use tapes at all. These relatively new devices use dedicated
hard drives similar to a computer's to record and store video from
your monitored system. When the drive is full the system can automatically
begin to overwrite the oldest frames of video with the newly recorded events
while still storing many days or weeks of recorded video. If desired the
data can first be archived instead of being overwritten. With this type of
system you will no longer have to worry about changing tapes or cleaning the VCR
heads. It is also much simpler to find the video needed when conducting an
investigation.
When using a digital
recorder a site can be also be monitored from many miles away over your
corporate network with remote monitoring. With this technology one camera, multiple cameras or
many sites could be monitored with streaming video.
