The two main areas of my business are installing wireless security alarms and CCTV. When customers buy the security alarm it is a lot
What makes a good DVR
easier for them to understand what they are getting for their money in comparison to the CCTV which is more complex.
In this guide I’m going to point to the most expensive piece of equipment usually in a CCTV system and that is the digital video recorder.
An example of this is you could be looking at buying an eight way digital video recorder with one terabyte hard drive and one machine could cost £300 and what looks to be very similar machine can cost three times that coming in at nearly £1000.
Obviously the more expensive DVR will have more features but the most important difference is it will have the ability to record a much clearer quality, which can be especially important if you need the machine for facial recognition.
When the machines record the better ones use the CIF format and 2CIF is better than CIF and 4CIF is better than two etc. This refers to the size of the picture being recorded. The higher resolutions produce recordings that match the capabilities of the cameras.Comparable to 4CIF format is D1 format and these give the clearest sharpest reproduction of analogue recordings.
Also cheaper machines when recording in higher settings like 4CIF and D1 can only manage to record at six frames per second, but the better quality machine can record at 25 frames per second using the best format D1/4CIF.
I hope I have made it understandable why buying more expensive DVR is worth the cost, when the machine which can produce recordings that look as good as the live real-time cameras.
If a CCTV installation is using high-resolution cameras it is obviously important to get an equally good DVR, because if the machine you choose is not capable of recording in equally good quality you are defeating the object of buying good quality cameras.
The biggest estate that people do regarding CCTV installation is played by inferior quality LED cameras that virtually dont work at all in lowlight conditions.
The second biggest mistake that tends to happen is that the cameras will have been chosen carefully and will be high-resolution with a full menu that work excellently in lowlight conditions, but unfortunately a cheap DVR has been used which means the recording quality is poor.
CCTV in the modern times as progressed enormously and good quality night vision cameras can now give extremely good visibility in very lowlight conditions. If you invest in good quality cameras and a good quality DVR, and have it installed by reputable company who can configure the settings correctly you will benefit by having an extremely functional CCTV installation.
