Why Security Cameras Are So Low Quality ? | UnikCCTV

In the twenty-first century, it appears like there is a camera everywhere on the back of someone's phone as they take a selfie, peeking over the heads of protesters, or set high on a wall filming all that goes on below. We live in an information age, but we also live in an observation age, with security cameras and monitoring becoming a normal and nearly unnoticeable part of our daily lives. Despite advances in camera technology, security and surveillance film nearly always seems to be two decades old, grainy, distorted, and monochrome.
Why is CCTV camera footage still so awful if this form of video monitoring is intended to keep us safe and assist authorities to arrest dangerous criminals?

Modern Cameras vs CCTV Footage

It's difficult not to notice the seeming bad video quality while watching a YouTube clip of a wild vehicle collision captured by a highway camera or the heroism of a clerk in a convenience store. Because some current smartphones are equipped with exceptionally high-quality cameras capable of recording 4K video, it appears unusual that huge corporations or local governments would have technology that is inferior to that found in hundreds of millions of wallets.

It's vital to keep in mind, though, that these two types of cameras are employed for completely different purposes. Smartphone cameras offer several advantages, such as bright colours and tiny size, but security cameras don't have to be small or color-capable. Instead, they excel in shooting in low-light or high-contrast circumstances, such as a person dressed in dark clothing at night. In such settings, a typical camera would struggle to acquire a good image, but many security cameras have IR (infrared) technology that can "illuminate" a dark region while still generating a clear image.

A digital zoom occurs when you hold up your smartphone to snap a photo and then spread two fingers to go closer. An optical zoom function, on the other hand, is a far more powerful tool on a CCTV camera since it allows the camera to physically zoom in, much like a DSLR camera, without the loss of resolution and graininess that a purely digital zoom causes.

Simply said, current camera phones do not have more advanced image technology than large-scale security systems; rather, the requirements, expectations, and constraints are simply different!

In most situations, not only is the use of these cameras poorly done, but there is a slew of additional issues that may degrade the quality of the footage, including the cost of the security system, lens quality, maintenance, internal compression, and exporting, to name a few.

Conclusion

In terms of technical quality, seeing grainy CCTV footage may feel like a step back a few decades, but there are a number of elements that contribute to the iconic, grainy, black-and-white films seen in every police drama and espionage thriller. Poor-quality video is most commonly caused by financial constraints, but other reasons such as storage restrictions, compression/resolution loss, camera maintenance, cropping of video clips, and inconspicuous camera placement can also be blamed!

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