School me a bit;
-I was hoping to get for @ $500, the wife's not on board.
-White dome cameras will look better on white fascia boards. Do bullets have better clarity?
-I ran CAT6 wiring thinking PoE was the way to go, and I see these have HDMI and VGA Video Outputs.
-How much of a difference is there between 1080 and 2MP? I don't need the best, just clear recognition to 15-20'
Thanks!
White cameras will blend in with lighter colors, you can find cameras in 4 primary colors which are usually White, Black, Gray and silver, you can paint the bodies any color you want but just like anything else you have to use to correct type of paint for the material the cameras are made out of and you have to make sure the prep work is on point without damaging seals or lenses.
Generally speaking bullet or dome cameras are simply the “shell”, years ago bullet cameras were used when you needed a camera with a smaller footprint and a dome wouldn’t fit, these days you can get the exact same camera in bullet or dome in various sizes, some people like the looks of one over.
As I mentioned above the video output on the recorder is different than the camera inputs, with POE cameras the inputs will be RJ45 connections, the outputs for the video out can be a wide range of connections, some will be digital like HDMI and Display port and other will be analog such as VGA, RCA and BNC, of course you’ll lose some output quality with analog outputs but it’s not a big deal especially if you have an old computer monitor laying around, you can always connect it to a free HDMI port on your TV which is what I did. I wouldn’t personally spend a ton of money on something just to use the digital outputs, but a cheap $99 32” Wal-Mart TV will look decent enough if you can’t connect the system to your primary big screen TV or have a spare computer monitor laying around.
There are many things that can affect the quality of the video you view, record and stream, the resolution of the cameras is the area that screws a lot of people up, the easiest way I can articulate the benefits of higher resolution cameras is this, if you have cameras ranging from 1 MP (720p) to Ultra 4K (3840x2160) of the same quality, lens size and focal length and you’re viewing them on a 20” monitor, for the most part you will not be able to tell the difference between the image “quality”, what you will notice is the lower resolution cameras will pixelate if you attempt to zoom in on the recorded video, the higher the resolution goes the more pixel density the image file will have and you can capture more detail.
What this means is, say you have a video clip of someone and you can’t quite see their face and want to zoom in on the video clip, you’re not actually zooming, you’re stretching the digital image and the lower the resolution the less you’ll be able stretch the image before the image pixelates and the persons face blows out, so in this case let’s say you have a video of someone, but you just can’t make out their face, with a 1mp camera what you see is what you get, with a 4mp camera you’ll be able to “zoom” (stretch) the image and have enough detail to see what color their eyes are, keep in mind that this is a loose explanation but the principle is accurate.
With the current technology you have the ability to tailor pretty much everything CCTV related, viewing image quality, recorded image quality, hardwired image quality and wireless image quality, all of this is a double edged sword because on one hand you dont have to spend hours calculating network bandwidth, HDD load, storage limitations, POE power distribution etc etc, but it can be overwhelming figuring all this out until you learn what settings do what and how they effect each other.
I’ll look around this weekend and see what’s available on the consumer side and try to point you in the right direction.