'border:thin dotted black; padding:3mm;'>If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The benefits of a network security camera system extend beyond the functionalities that an analog security camera system can provide. The advantages include remote accessibility, high image quality, even management and intelligent video capabilities, easy integration possibilities and better scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Someone could access, manage, and view live and recorded video from anywhere around the world with an internet connection. Network security systems these days are also referred to as IP-based networks because the communicate over the network using the Internet Protocol, which is the same thing as your office network that you can connect to from virtually anywhere, anytime through the internet.

This makes it possible to outsource the monitoring of the surveillance to a third-party person or security firm. The third-party security firms usually are the people who will manage, install and fix the entire system if you bought it from them and can remotely diagnose problems as well.

With an analog CCTV system, you would have to be at the monitoring site to view and manage video, and remote video access would require installation of additional equipment such as a video encoder or a network digital video recorder (DVR). A DVR is the digital version of a video cassette recorder.

Network security cameras offer progressive scan and megapixel technology that analog cameras cannot. With the digital technology, these cameras produce much clearer images and higher resolution. Also, digital images do not degrade like traditional analog video data would.

Also, digital data does not degrade when transported unlike analog signals which degrade over the distance of cables it travels. And if you happen to have a hybrid analog to digital conversion to take advantage of the network capabilities, there needs to be conversions of video from analog to digital, for the digital camera, then back to analog, for transmission through analog cables, then to digital again for the DVR. Each time there is a conversion the image is degraded. With a purely digital security camera system, the camera is the only instance the image gets digitized.

Another benefit of a network security camera is that the cameras can be placed and networked from anywhere that has a wireless signal, or a nearby network port. It can also be removed much more cleanly than an analog camera which needs an individual cable directly from the camera to the source of recording.

All network security products are built to an open standard can be integrated with computers and Ethernet-based devices and software. Also, as the video system grows, the scalability and flexibility of a network security camera system comes in extremely handy. Any number of cameras and devices can be added to the system with minimal invasion to the infrastructure already in place.

For these reasons, it’s just much more cost effective. Which in itself is another reason analog systems are losing favor to digital network security systems. Management of the hardware is a breeze compared to the cumbersome analog system. And as wireless technology advances and becomes cheaper, analog equipment are slowly beginning to fade into obsolesce.