Simplified: Digital and Analogue CCTV Installations in Gauteng
The choice between various CCTV installations in Gauteng can leave homeowners and business owners a little flustered. It’s the difference between analogue and digital which causes the most confusion; a difference we’re about to clear up.
Analogue CCTV Installations
Think back a couple of years to the era of video tapes. Analogue CCTV installations hail back from those days and were designed to work with video machines. As such feeds captured through analogue CCTV installations in Gauteng are stored on video tapes, even today.
Video tapes, however, are only capable of recording one camera feed at a time. This means that visual feeds need constant monitoring to ensure that only relevant incidents are captured. Once a video tape is full, new feeds can only be stored on clean tapes, or written over existing camera feeds. One additional aspect that has to be kept in mind is that these tapes allow for manual searching only – you’ll have to forward and rewind until you find what you are looking for.
Digital CCTV Installations
Digital CCTV installations in Gauteng solve most of the inconveniences created by their analogue counterparts. They rely on normal computer network cables or wireless technology to transmit video feeds. Each individual camera’s video feed can be stored separately on a computer or server, and is only limited by the amount of hard disk space available. Searching through recordings are easier too, since the computer does all the hard work: simply specify your search criteria and you’ll have the information in a couple of seconds at most.
The only downside to digital CCTV installations in Gauteng is that they require quite a lot of bandwidth to transmit the higher quality video feed. As such companies with relatively old computer networks will have to upgrade their networks to accommodate digital CCTV’s bandwidth requirements without affecting their current network demands.
The Switch to Digital
Even from appearances alone it’s obvious that digital CCTV installations in Gauteng are the better choice. In the future they’ll also be the more affordable choice. But companies who have already invested in their analogue systems are often reluctant to spend more money to change to a digital system.
Thanks to technology there exist a number of devices capable of converting analogue video feeds into digital feeds. However, the cost of said equipment and its installation could cost quite a penny, and should be weighed against new digital CCTV installations in Gauteng, and also against potential losses should they occur as a result of an analogue system’s shortcomings. As such our advice to all new customers is to go digital and save in the long run.