What matters most in a CCTV setup?
Where the camera is mounted, the light it sees, the hard disk it records to, and the cable and power behind it. Cameras from the mainstream brands are broadly similar; installations are not. A modest camera in the right place, on good cable and a UPS, beats an expensive one in the wrong place.
When a customer asks us which camera to buy, we usually answer with a question: where is it going? A camera is one link in a chain, and the links that fail are rarely the one everybody compares.
1. Position beats specification
A camera only records what it is pointed at. Mounted too high, a billing counter becomes the tops of heads. Mounted too low, the first customer in the queue hides everyone behind. Aimed across a whole room, the thing you care about is a few pixels in a corner, and no resolution fixes that.
- Give each camera one job and frame it around that: the counter, the dock door, the kitchen pass, the table section.
- Check what will be in the way in six months: signage, stacked stock, a plant that grows, a door left open.
- Mount it where it can’t be knocked, turned or covered without someone noticing.
2. Light is the real lens
Most poor footage is a lighting problem. A camera facing a glass entrance on a sunny afternoon turns every customer into a silhouette. At night, the camera’s own night-vision lights bounce off a nearby wall or window and wash out the picture. Old tube lights flicker. A renovation moves the lights and nobody moves the camera.
The fix is usually cheap: turn the camera so the light is behind it, add a lamp over the area that matters, keep glass out of the frame at night. A more expensive camera pointed into the sun still sees a silhouette.
3. The recorder matters less than the disk inside it
Recorders from the major brands do the same job well. The part that fails is the hard disk, and it tends to fail quietly: live view keeps working, so everyone assumes the system is recording, until the day someone needs last Tuesday’s footage and it isn’t there.
- Use disks built for surveillance, which are rated to write around the clock. Desktop disks are not.
- Size the disk for the number of days you must keep, at the quality you record.
- Check that it is actually recording, and watch the disk’s health, instead of finding out during an incident.
4. Cabling and power decide whether it works at all
When a camera goes offline, the camera itself is rarely the cause. It is a badly crimped connector, a cable run alongside power lines, an outdoor joint letting in rain, a cable chewed through above a false ceiling, or a cheap network switch that powers the cameras and overheats in a closed rack.
Power is the other half. Frequent cuts and voltage swings reboot recorders mid-write, damage disks and take whole stores dark. A small UPS on the recorder and the network switch costs far less than the footage it protects.
- Use proper, tested cable and connectors, and keep each network cable run under 100 metres.
- Keep camera cables away from power lines, and seal outdoor joints against water.
- Put the recorder and the network switch on a UPS.
What to spend on
If the budget is fixed, spend it in this order:
- A site survey before anything is bought.
- Cabling, connectors and a UPS.
- Surveillance-grade disks, sized for the days you must keep.
- Lighting fixes where the cameras need them.
- Cameras: a mainstream brand, at the resolution the task needs.
Where Tarsyer fits
We work with the cameras and recorders a business already has, from any mainstream brand, so we see a lot of installations. Before a site goes live we check each camera’s angle and light. Afterwards our device watches the whole chain: when a camera goes dark, moves, blurs or its recorder stops responding, the alert says which.