In These Advanced Times, Why is Cctv Footage Quality Not Improving

As we sat (my partner and I) watching another space filing TV show made on the cheap featuring CCTV and bugling criminals being as stupid as they possibly could a thought struck us, and it’s a very serious one… With all the technological advances that have occurred over the last ten or so years which include mobile phone video, lightweight camcorders, and webcams why on earth has the image quality on CCTV video not improved at all in this time?

I guess you could argue the toss that a lot of CCTV equipment was bought some years ago and this could be the reason. But when new department stores, hotels, and malls are opening still at an alarming rate despite global recession the equipment going into them surely not is of age?

I need to draw personal evidence into this, a year or so ago I found myself surveying video camera footage in a new luxury hotel, the footage I was watching contained vital evidence of a brutal assault between two members of staff, and a very severe breach of trust that rather interestingly involved the victim of the earlier assault. While it was clear in the footage involving an assault who the two involved were, the image quality was so poor it was difficult to ascertain how it all started, and the severity of the blows. In the second piece of footage some money had gone missing from a staff members till and it seemed that they took money and placed it in their shirt. However the clarity of image did not really show if the item was in fact money, and if so how much.

In this incident the equipment used was top of the range (allegedly) gear, which digitally recorded the images onto a massive set of hard-drives. You could within a matter of seconds pinpoint a point in time as and when required. However you could not clearly make it out.

Image via Wikipedia

In days gone, poor quality images have been put down to poor placement of cameras, badly worn videotapes, and poor quality recording heads in video recording systems. Here we are however in new century (although now a decade in) and we are still churning out poor quality recoding.

All across the globe we have crime shows that ask you the viewer to study CCTV footage and help the police solve crimes by identifying the people involved. Yet more often than not they are asking you to make an identification of someone from badly pixelated footage so made that it looks like the very first Mario Brothers games.

You can look out of your window and with your video camera on your mobile phone capture images so good that they are almost as good as television transmission quality.

Is this an overlooked area of technology, or is there a reason for these poor quality images, while you might not have given this a great deal of thought before hopefully you will give it some serious consideration now. The most bizarre thing about this is that seek as you might, Google to your hearts content you cannot find a conclusive answer to the question.

If your thinking about installing CCTV at home or at work, consider the image quality and also consider the installation of some sort of webcam technology, because an unclear image could mean the difference between solving a crime, and you becoming a victim of crime with no hope of resolution.