From being used as a pay-per-view television device for sports such as professional boxing to being used as a security device that has actually reduced crime rates, CCTV has come a long way. They provide a more secure environment, be it at work or at home and in recent times have seen widespread use overall. A home CCTV camera or a camera for office allows you to monitor the condition of your residence or your workspace 24×7 from your smartphone or a centralized control station and significantly reduces the risk of burglaries and robberies. CCTV installations also provide the following added benefits:
- The cameras can be set up in any blind spot that may be present on your property so that the result of any stray noise isn’t always a cold sweat down your back but a matter of simply looking into a screen to see if you’re about to get robbed. They can also be set up at the doorway to your residence, enabling visual identification of any late-night visitor.
- Maintenance requirements for such camera systems is minimal at best, with well spread-out, routine professional inspections. Apart from having to wipe them down occasionally to get rid of any dust or grime that might have accumulated, you’re good to go. Once installed, they continue to operate till breakdown occurs.
- In addition to being a severely significant discouragement for criminals planning to target your residence or office space for a burglary, CCTVs can also act as evidence for crimes that unfortunately do end up occurring. They can help the authorities bring to justice criminals involved in not only your own property but also on some other individual’s property that happened to be in view of the CCTV.
- A less advertised advantage of a CCTV system are the insurance benefits that it can provide; a more secure property evaluation can lead to lower insurance costs since the property is less likely to get robbed or vandalized.
- From a business point of view, being able to monitor exactly what is going on in the workspace can improve work output and lead to better employee-employer relationships. Keeping track of deliveries and visitors and your staff in general will lead to smoother functioning of the business as a whole.
CCTV installations can be of two types – wired and wireless. For wireless systems, a major disadvantage presents itself in the form of other electrical appliances that can interfere with the specific frequencies required by the CCTV system to record images, resulting in loss of image quality and improper recording. The only disadvantage for wired systems is mobility; once installed it is very difficult to move these cameras to new locations since the wiring involved is pretty heavy duty and would take a large amount of work to redo. That’s why installation location of wired systems has to be carefully chosen.
But apart from these small drawbacks that can easily be overcome, CCTV camera installations provide a great option for security, be it at home or at work.
