HD CCTV is so much better than analogue in very many respects. You have probably seen countless analogue images on television of crimes being committed, where shopkeepers are robbed by gun or knife-wielding assailants. Very often the pictures are so grainy and the faces unrecognisable to the extent that you wonder how on earth they can be of any use to the police.

Why HD CCTV? Well, how useful is that grainy image?

The sad fact is that on many occasions they are of absolutely no use at all in identifying the individual. Indeed, if you have old analogue security cameras on your premises, it is probably time to start thinking about upgrading them to HD.

HD stands for high definition and that's what you will get.

If you have an analogue camera and an HD camera covering the same area, the HD camera will produce an image which has three or four times the quality of the analogue one. This greater quality means that you will get far greater clarity and detail with HD than you ever will with analogue.

Analogue vs HD CCTV in the real world...

Back in 2012, we reported how the police were turning to CCTV to help with falling officer numbers.   However, the images have to be usable and in 2011, ACPO produced a set of rules governing their use in criminal investigations.

A relatively recent incident – two incidents in fact – illustrate this.  A shopkeeper was attacked by a thug wielding a pick-axe handle and robbed of his takings. The analogue footage of the crime was of no help to the police whatsoever, and in view of this the shopkeeper decided to upgrade his system to HD CCTV.

Less than a month later, he was robbed again by the same thug. On this occasion, police were able to recognise the man by an unusual ring he was wearing which showed clearly on the HD footage, but was not visible in the earlier analogue tape. He eventually confessed to both crimes.

Furthermore, because you get a better quality picture with an HD CCTV camera than you do with an analogue one, you need fewer cameras to cover the same property.

An analogue camera only transfers pictures to a video tape and one of the problems is that you have to remember to change the tape every day. You also need somewhere to store the tapes.

In addition, all that an analogue camera can do is to store the picture for future use, when you review the night of a crime, for example. So analogue cannot monitor a property from a remote location.

Monitoring with HD

An HD CCTV camera, however, scans the scene in front of it and broadcasts the information over a Local Area Network to a server, or computer. The server can then transmit the image to anywhere in the world. So with HD CCTV you can now keep an eye on your property from anywhere, since real time images can be transmitted to your smart phone or tablet.

The software can also be upgraded to allow for monitoring of specific flagged items, and can perform a whole range of other security functions.

In addition, there are now HD CCTV cameras on the market that have their own built in web server, so that an external computer is no longer needed, the image being transmitted directly to wherever is needed for storage and playback.

There is no doubt that HD CCTV is the security camera of the future.  Their use will result in better identification of intruders leading in turn to more convictions and, it is to be hoped, lower crime rates as a result.

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At Spy Alarms, we work closely with the industries manufacturers which allows us to gain access to the latest in CCTV technology. For a FREE quote for a new HD CCTV system, please get in touch with our team today.