The worst thing that could happen to them is the loss of these possessions through burglary. Cunning thieves can, in a minute, can cart away thousands of dollars worth of valuables, appliances, products, and cash from an unsuspecting owner. Worse, some may even threaten to physically harm the owner just so they can get what they want.

To protect themselves from burglary, security systems are installed in the house or in the office. These security systems can be as traditional as a high fence, a dog, or the employing of a guard or high tech such as alarm systems and motion sensors.

One of the most reliable surveillance systems for a home or business is a security camera. This camera allows a homeowner or business owner to monitor everything in the vicinity of the camera's location. The images are transmitted to a set of monitors in his house or office where he can see what is going on outside in safety.

While there are monitors that are specifically made for cameras, many homeowners and business owners opt to use their computers or TV sets as monitors. To make it function as a camera monitor, it would need a DVR card, or a digital video recorder card. This is a device that plugs into a personal computer and converts images to digital signals that are that could be projected into a PC monitor. Or this could be incorporated into a digital video recorder which could then be connected to a normal TV set.

For those who are starters in the digital vide recorders, they have to make a choice between purchasing a stand-alone DVR or PC-based DVR. A stand-alone DVR is like somewhat like a DVD player; it records and stores the images in a built-in hard drive.

Nowadays, the most common DVRs that are used are PC-based. They have become more popular than stand-alones. PC-based DVRs have expansion capabilities; that is the main advantage. This means that a person can start out with a small number of channels, say eight. As he places more cameras into his place, he can expand the PC-based DVR by putting in more channels; some PC-based DVRs go up to sixty-four channels. Now that's a lot of cameras.

Stand-alone versions, on the other hand, are usually limited to the number of channels that are built in into the device itself. If a person needs more, he has to buy a new stand-alone DVR with more channels.

While there are a lot of DVR cards in the market, care should be taken in purchasing one for a security system. That's because poor-quality DVRs also show poor quality videos. Additionally, such DVR also have slow recording and display speeds, totally unreliable remote control capabilities, and a very limited capacity for storing images. Indeed, choosing the wrong one is very frustrating, especially if the person is relying on it for security.