Outdoor Surveillance Systems - How To Pick The Right Outdoor Dome Camera

When you are trying to protect your house against the perpetrators, the right choice of an outdoor surveillance system is crucial. In this short article, we will focus on properly selecting the outdoor dome cameras to maximize the protection. In addition to placing security cameras on each floor inside the house, the correct selection and placement of the outdoor cameras will be most helpful in both deterring the perpetrator, or identifying and ultimately catching them if they decided to act. The selection of the outdoor cameras must take into account the following criteria: Distance and focus, and Night vision. Let's look more closely into these criteria.

Distance and focus

As opposed to indoor security dome cameras with a limited distances to cover, an outdoor camera must cover significant ranges of distances, from a near by, a few yards away, to several dozens of yards away, and more. In addition the correct lens must be chosen, not to be to wide to lose detail on smaller objects, and not too narrow-field to lose sight of the objects outside of the field. If a proper compromise can not be reached, the best solution may simply be to add another camera, one for the close-up image of an entrance, and another for the longer-range imagery, such as of the front yard.

As far as focus, to keep important goings-on in focus, you can opt for a more expensive auto-focus camera.

Night vision

This is another important component that most indoor cameras need not have. It is the night vision capability. Outdoor surveillance cameras for 24/7 surveillance must be equipped with the night vision capability. What good is protection of the house during the day if the house stays unprotected during the night time. A night vision camera has two ways of recording images. During daytime, a regular, color camera is activated while at night, the infrared LED diodes are turned on that illuminate the objects with the invisible infrared light, and then the reflected infrared light is recorded with the second recorder in the camera. This recorder is designed to be sensitive to the reflected infrared light.

There are several other considerations needed for outdoor cameras, such as, should you go with the outdoor dome camera in the first place, or with the bullet shaped camera, and should you go with the digital, IP based, camera or with the older, analog models.

For more information on all the above issues please see the website outdoor CCTV camera. You can also explore the types of home surveillance cameras that are available and pick the best for your situation.