A closed-circuit television camera can produce images or recordings for surveillance or other private purposes. Cameras can be either video cameras, or digital stills cameras. Walter Bruch was the inventor of the CCTV camera. The main purpose of a CCTV camera is to capture light and convert it into a video signal. Underpinning a CCTV camera is a CCD sensor. The CCD converts light into an electrical signal and then signal processing converts this electrical signal into a video signal that can be recorded or displayed on the screen.
Can record straight to a video tape recorder which are able to record analogue signals as pictures. If the analogue signals are recorded to tape, then the tape must run at a very slow speed in order to operate continuously. This is because in order to allow a three-hour tape to run for 24 hours, it must be set to run on a slow time-lapse basis, usually about four frames per second. In one second, the camera scene can change dramatically. A person for example can have walked a distance of 1 meter, and therefore if the distance is divided into four parts, i.e. four frames or "snapshots" in time, then each frame invariably looks like a blur, unless the subject keeps relatively still. Analogue signals can also be converted into a digital signal to enable the recordings to be stored on a PC as digital recordings. In that case the analogue video camera must be plugged directly into a video capture card in the computer, and the card then converts the analogue signal to digital. These cards are relatively cheap, but inevitably the resulting digital signals are compressed 5:1 in order for the video recordings to be saved on a continuous basis. Another way to store recordings on a non-analogue media is through the use of a digital video recorder. Such a device is similar in functionality to a PC with a capture card and appropriate video recording software. Unlike PCs, most DVRs designed for CCTV purposes are embedded devices that require less maintenance and simpler setup than a PC-based solution, for a medium to a large number of analogue cameras. Some DVRs also allow digital broadcasting of the video signal, thus acting like a network camera. If a device does allow broadcasting of the video, but does not record it, then it's called a video server. These devices effectively turn any analogue camera into a network TV.
Digital
These cameras do not require a video capture card because they work using a digital signal which can be saved directly to a computer. The signal is compressed 5:1, but DVD quality can be achieved with more compression. The highest picture quality of DVD is only slightly lower than the quality of basic 5:1-compression DV. Saving uncompressed digital recordings takes up an enormous amount of hard drive space, and a few hours of uncompressed video could quickly fill up a hard drive. Holiday uncompressed recordings may look fine but one could not run uncompressed quality recordings on a continuous basis. Motion detection is therefore sometimes used as a work around solution to record in uncompressed quality. However, in any situation where standard-definition video cameras are used, the quality is going to be poor because the maximum pixel resolution of the image chips in most of these devices is 320,000 pixels ; they generally capture horizontal and vertical fields of lines and blend them together to make a single frame; the maximum frame rate is normally 30 frames per second. Nevertheless, multi-megapixel IP-CCTV cameras are coming on the market. Still quite expensive, but they can capture video images at resolutions of 1, 2, 3, 5 and even up to 11 Mpix. Unlike with analogue cameras, details such as number plates are easily readable. At 11 Mpix, forensic quality images are made where each hand on a person can be distinguished. Because of the much higher resolutions available with these , they can be set up to cover a wide area where normally several analogue cameras would have been needed. The world's largest digital CCTV camera is a scaled up ST 205 CCTV camera unveiled by TelView on the 10th of July 2011. It measures 1.7 metres x 4.56m x 1.6m and has a sensitivity of 0.01 lux.
Network
s or network cameras are analogue or digital video cameras, plus an embedded video server having an IP address, capable of streaming the video. Because network cameras are embedded devices, and do not need to output an analogue signal, resolutions higher than closed-circuit television 'CCTV' analogue cameras are possible. A typical analogue CCTV camera has a PAL or NTSC, whereas network cameras may have VGA, SVGA or quad-VGA resolutions. An analogue or digital camera connected to a video server acts as a network camera, but the image size is restricted to that of the video standard of the camera. However, optics, not video resolution, are the components that determine the image quality. Network cameras can be used for very cheap surveillance solutions, or to replace entire CCTV installations.
