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.



The digital nature of these new cameras, however, makes is possible to do so much more than analog security camera systems could ever do. Digital CCTV cameras and systems offer much more advanced combinations of recording power as I explain below.

How Digital CCTV works

By installing a surveillance capture card in your computer, you turn your computer into a digital video recorder. This gives you the highest quality video compression as well as the lowest storage requirement. The video output from your digital security camera is digitized, making possible an impressive array of benefits.

Digital Recording Benefits

One of the most popular features is the ability to view live streaming images from a computer or cell phone anywhere in the world. You gain access to your cameras and recordings by logging into your system by a secure username and password over the internet.

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.

You can even program your digital security camera to focus specifically on some situations that it sees and ignore others. For example, you can program it to stop recording when nothing is moving in its field of vision, or record with reduced resolution. You can program it to notice and send you an email or phone notification if something that is supposed to be there is missing, or notify you if it detects something that isn't supposed to be there.

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 CCTV systems, however, are not totally without drawback. The files generated by computer security cameras can fill up hard drive space quickly. That, however, is where you'll find the ability to program your cameras to stop recording in certain situations comes in handy. By avoiding recording the vast majority of time, when nothing worth recording is happening, you'll find that you save a tremendous amount of disk space.

Is a digital security camera right for you?

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.