Is your saved Video as good as your Viewed video?

HPI designs systems to record at their highest and best quality so that when you view or discover a crime or incident your achived video stored is as good as you can get with what you purchased. One aspect of achieving that high quality is the video resolution. Here’s what you can expect.

Resolution Comparison

The Resolution of the camera is the size of the recorded video, which determines clarity. Higher resolution cameras produce larger recorded video. Consumer Grade products record in low resolution producing poor quality when the video is enlarged to full screen. Because HD Megapixel resolution cameras record at 1080p or better resolutions, they allow zooming of recorded video while retaining video clarity. Around the year 2015, Full High Definition cameras (over 2MP) came down in price to the point where HPI stopped offering all standard definition cameras as the image quality was so amazing on the full HD cameras for the same price.

Today HPI installs all High Definition cameras and simply adjusts them down as needed for areas under surveillance that are closer and do not require that level of detail. That will give you more days of video archived or saved video on the local hard disk drive while retaining the flexibility to ramp up recording resolution if needed.

The table below lists some of the more commonly used resolution terms in CCTV applications. Any resolution over 1 million pixels is considered ‘megapixel’. In the case of megapixel cameras, the labels are approximate. For example, a 2 megapixel camera actually captures 1,920,000 pixels per frame. A 3 megapixel camera captures 3,145,728 pixels per frame.

You might ask if the smaller resolution standards are even worth mentioning given today’s megapixel capabilities. But QCIF and CIF are still relevant when considering mobile devices. Images on a phone are usually displayed at QCIF for example. But, just to be clear, the image may be captured and stored on the DVR at its full megapixel resolution but transmitted by the recorder and displayed at QCIF on the mobile device.