A Guide to CCTV Recorders
There is a slection of Digital Video Recorders on our website alone, we understand trying to buy the right one is not simple, and differs for each situation. So we have put together some information about the features available so that you can try to make a more educated decision.
Simply look through the features listed, and try to see what is important for you, keeping in mind the purpose of your CCTV system.
Digital Video Recorder Basics
Some common features are covered below, this section is for those with no knowledge about a CCTV set up. The Digital Video Recorder is the “brain” of a CCTV system, it takes the images from the cameras and stores them on to a hard disk drive. You can then look at the images recorded on the hard drive, and review what the cameras have been viewing by connecting a monitor (or other form of display unit) to the DVR. You can forward & rewind through the images in much the same way you may have done so with a typical Video recorder. On many you can search for specific dates & times to quickly find the footage you want to view.
Once you have your images recorded on the hard drive, from time to time there may be an incident which you will be required to give to the police as evidence, you will then need to back up the data they require from the hard drive on to another storage device.
Digital Video Recorders are available as Standalone units or PC based units. Choosing which one is for you is a personal preference, but let’s take this opportunity to point out a couple of things. Although many PC based digital video recorders offer lots of added features & familiar use, standalone digital video recorders are purpose built for the job and are considered more reliable and therefore less likely to fail. With PC based units we would strongly recommend the PC is used as a security device only and not used as a standard PC with surveillance, this should reduce the risk of failures.
Also if you are “PC savvy” and decide to buy a Digital video recorder PC Card and install it into your PC yourself, please check that you will not void your PC warranty before you do.
Last but not least, and this goes for all Digital Video Recorders, where possible try to use a purpose built hard drive. By this we mean that some people, to save costs, use a normal PC hard drive in a digital video recorder. Unfortunately this usually ends up with the hard drive failing simply because a pc hard drive is not designed to be constantly “working” twenty four hours a day — seven days a week. At JMC we only offer digital video recorders from manufacturers who use purpose built hard drives, but as not all of our digital video recorders are offered with a hard drive pre-installed for you please bare this in mind. Also please check the compatibility of the hard drive with your digital video recorder, as some may require IDE drives, others SATA, some may work better with Seagate, others Maxtor. Where available we have stated this information in the product information.
Ok, now hopefully you have a better idea about what a digital video recorder is, and its purpose, we’ve listed some features below which we advise you to learn more about what a digital video recorder is capable of and then browse through our site to find one that fits your situation.
And good luck with your security project…