Five Mistakes Businesses Make When Buying Security Cameras

Author: Scott McQuarrie, Founder and CEO, Backstreet Surveillance

I started in this business in 1990 as a technician, pulling cable and hanging boxes. Since then I have been a project manager, a system designer, an installation manager, a sales manager, and a CEO four times over. I still design systems myself.

After thirty-six years, here is what I can tell you. Almost every bad camera system was decided badly long before anybody argued about a brand. The equipment is usually not the problem. These five are.

1. Asking one camera to do two jobs

This is the most common mistake I see, and it costs people more than any of the others.

Somebody tells me they want to watch the parking lot. Fine. That is a wide shot, forty or fifty feet out. Then they add that they also want to read the plates on cars going by on the street, which is eighty or ninety feet out. Those are two different focal points. That is two jobs.

You can point one camera at both, and you will get a fine picture of the lot and a fine picture of a car going past. What you will not get is the plate. The detail is not there.

So the rule is simple. Do not ask one camera to do the job of two. Decide what each camera is for, then buy a camera for each job.

2. Ignoring the sixty foot line

Wide angle lenses come standard on most cameras people buy. A 3.6 millimeter lens opens up around ninety degrees. A 2.8 opens up around a hundred and ten. They cover a lot of ground up close, which is exactly why they look so good in a showroom.

But covering a lot of ground up close means everything at distance gets small. Somewhere around sixty feet, a wide angle lens stops giving you facial identification or a readable plate. You will still see a person at a hundred feet. You will not know who they are.

Here is the simple part of it. Inside sixty feet, a wide angle lens is fine. Past sixty feet you want a zoom lens, so you can optically pull that distance in and make things at eighty or a hundred feet bigger.

Ask any vendor what lens is going on each camera and what the target distance is for that camera. If they cannot answer that, they have not designed anything. They have priced you a parts list.

3. Buying a recorder with no room to grow

Recorders come in fixed sizes. Four channels, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four. That is how this industry builds them, and it matters more than people expect.

Nearly every system grows after it goes in. Either the customer sees how well it works and wants more coverage, or the original design was light and the weak spots show up in the first month.

Here is what that means for you. If you buy a four channel recorder for four cameras and then need a fifth, the four channel recorder goes in the trash. You are not adding a camera, you are replacing the recorder and moving everything over.

So buy one size up from what you need today. If you need four, get the eight. If you are sitting at seven, think hard about the sixteen. It is the cheapest insurance in this business.

4. Never deciding what happens when you actually need the video

Everybody plans the installation. Almost nobody plans the incident.

Retention is a business decision, not a technical one. If your problems tend to surface a month after they happen, then thirty days is your real requirement, and that changes your recorder, your drives, and sometimes your network. While you are asking, find out what the recorder costs to license per channel. That number comes back every year and it rarely shows up on the first quote.

Then run the drill once. It is eleven at night, somebody needs footage, and your installer is not picking up. Can the person standing in your building find the right clip and hand it to someone in a format that opens on another computer? If nobody there has ever done it, you do not have a security system. You have a hard drive filling up.

5. Believing the demo

Every camera looks good in a demo. Demos happen indoors, in good light, pointed at a cooperative person standing eight feet away. Your loading dock is not that.

Ask to see the camera working on a site like yours, at night, in your weather. Ask what the picture does when the sun comes over the building in the morning and hits the lens straight on. A vendor who is glad you asked is worth your time. A vendor who changes the subject just saved you money.

That gap between the demo and the deployment is why I created a weekly show called Beyond the Demo: The Ground Truth, hosted by Rob Oldham, Vice President, Backstreet Surveillance.

None of this asks you to become a security expert. It asks you to make a vendor answer plainly, about your site, with numbers.

A camera either performs in the parking lot at two in the morning or it doesn't. Everything else is a brochure.

About:

Scott McQuarrie is the founder and CEO of Backstreet Surveillance and a 36-year security industry veteran. Since starting at Honeywell in 1990, he has built and sold three security companies, generated more than $180 million in online security sales, and protected sites from airports to embassies.