End Users
In recent years, increased awareness of public safety and availability of digital technology has brought about a huge increase in demand for digital upgrades in video surveillance. In response to this demand, manufacturers introduced many claimed-to-be-HD security surveillance products, with confusing marketing terms such as HD analog (is it analog or HD?). The abundance of products has driven down their cost considerably, resulting in a wide range of price and performance in modern security surveillance products.
Most end-users carefully weigh price and performance when procuring their solutions. It is important to remember that the need of cabling and re-cabling (either now or future) should not be overlooked when assessing the cost of solutions.
Take HD analog as an example. These cameras are one of the cheapest and most popular in the market. However, an HD analog camera is nothing more than an analog camera with improved sensor resolution. Even though the captured video quality may have HD, or even multi-mega-pixel resolution as some claim, in the camera, the video is nonetheless delivered using old, analog transmission techniques. It therefore inherits all problems of analog cameras due to analog transmission, such as ghost images, snowy video, etc. The video quality is very sensitive to the cable condition and degrades with increased cable length. And worse of all, the video quality of HD analog degrades over time as the cable ages, and will eventually become unacceptable just like old, analog systems. Even with brand new cable installation to begin with, in some cases re-cabling is needed again in a matter of just a year or two.
CCHDTV (DTV for short), on the other hand, is a fully digital technology that uses digital transmission techniques to deliver digital video. It is very much like IP cameras, with the important difference that it can run not only on Ethernet cables, but also directly on old, existing coaxial cables. A digital upgrade using DTV from analog cctv (or HD analog) does not require re-cabling, now or future.
When the long-term installation cost is factored into consideration, DTV indeed is the best choice for digital upgrade.