If you ever considered installing surveillance cameras system at home or at work, chances are you noticed quite significant price difference between cameras you can purchase from Amazon, BestBuy or Costco and the ones offered by professional surveillance systems installers. Why would you pay $200-$300 per camera when consumer sellers offer models that might start as low as $40-50 per unit? Sounds like a reasonable question, but is there really a difference? Are low-cost cameras a good solution for a store, school, hospital, office, shop, or even a home security system?
The short answer is no. Read on to learn about the main two differences between consumer grade and professional security camera IP systems.
Quality and reliability.
There’s a good reason why consumer grade cameras can cost way less. Remember the old saying “you get what you pay for”? This is exactly the case here. The quality of components used in low-cost consumer grade cameras is okay at best. This is the reason they typically don’t last that long and can get replaced after a few months of operation. As a result, installing such a camera system can make it just as expensive if not more than the professional security camera solution installed from the beginning. Unlike consumer grade security camera solutions, professional IP cameras are designed to last for many years and provide much better video quality in both normal and low light conditions.
Video recording and storage.
Usually, low-cost security camera models have a simple motion detection module that triggers video recording. With these modules, the recording starts as soon as any kind of motion is detected, no matter if this is a person, an object or a bird flying by. As a result, you may get a lot of useless footage that will make it harder to find the recording you are looking for.
Speaking of storing the recorded footage, consumer IP camera systems offer two ways to store recorded videos. The first option is memory cards which have limited capacity, making it hard to keep track of the footage from multiple cameras. The second option is a cloud server. The issue with this solution is that data upload is done via the home internet connection which negatively impacts home network speed and limits the number of cameras to be connected in the same home.
On the other hand, professional grade IP cameras securely connect to dedicated video recording systems, streaming encrypted video data. These systems have effective detection modules that can be set to start recording only if it detects a person, the detected person enters a certain area, or a detected object is of a certain size.
As for the storage, unlike consumer grade IP camera systems, their professional counterparts can record video from many network-connected cameras. The number of cameras in a system can range from a few to hundreds spread across multiple locations. Finally, professional IP camera systems include recording search features allowing you to find the video you want quickly.
One other important aspect we must mention is that professional IP cameras setups can be integrated with stand-alone IP intercoms, access control, license plate recognition and gate control systems as well as full-size home automation systems which significantly increases security for any location they are installed at.
To summarize the article, if you are serious about security for your property, be it your home or a business location, professional IP cameras systems are the way to go, because they provide better quality, functionality, security and able to support large number of cameras.
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