Surveillance

Video surveillance systems are very important to businesses for a number of reasons; physical security, inventory control, and safety, just to mention a few. There are two primary types of surveillance systems available today, they are analog systems and digital systems and both have their advantages and disadvantages. Well you might that digital systems are better just think of VHS (analog) and DVD (digital) and you are correct, but let’s get into the differences between the two systems. Video in both analog and digital systems starts and ends in digital format which might lead one to wonder what difference it really makes. All cameras start out the same with a digital image sensor, in analog systems the image is then converted from digital to analog before being transferred over coaxial cable to the DVR and then converted back to digital and stored. This process of converting digital to analog then back to digital causes loss in the analog transmission of the signal and is easily susceptible to interference or noise.

Digital systems are actually much simpler as the signal begins as a digital signal, is transmitted digitally and is stored digitally often without any type of conversion being necessary. Now you are probably thinking digital sounds pretty good now what is so good about analog systems. Analog systems offer lower cost cameras and DVR’s and if you already have an analog system in place you can simply install new equipment on each end of the cable in order to upgrade your system, however you can never turn this type of installation into a digital system without replacing the coaxial cable used to connect the cameras to the DVR. True digital systems or Internet Protocol (IP) camera systems offer very distinct advantages and can often times cost considerably less than analog systems. In an analog system each camera requires a home run cable back to the DVR, IP camera systems however run over the network and therefore do not require a home run for each camera as networks can be extended and expanded using switches additionally different media types such as Ethernet, fiber optic and wireless and even internet can be used to connect cameras to the recording server. IP camera systems can scale multiple locations and reach distances that analog systems are not designed to address. For these reasons surveillance systems are transitioning to digital to offer improved quality and increased flexibility in deployment. Contact Adaptive Networks today for more information about surveillance systems.