Everything a business owner needs to know before buying cameras
Written by the team that installs camera systems and runs its own AI monitoring platform. No sales pitch in the guides: work out what you need, then get quotes from anyone, including us.
Read before you spend
How Many Security Cameras Does My Business Need?
The number of cameras a site needs has little to do with its floor area. It depends on what you need each camera to…
Camera Resolution and Lens Choice: A Practical Guide
More megapixels do not automatically mean a more useful picture. What matters is how many pixels land on the thing you care about, and…
CCTV Storage: How to Work Out Days of Retention
Storage is the one part of a camera system where the maths is simple and the guesses are usually wrong. Work out the bitrate…
CCTV Networks: PoE, Cabling, VLANs and Bandwidth
A camera system is a small network carrying constant traffic. Most of the problems blamed on cameras are really switch, cable or bandwidth problems.
AI CCTV vs Motion Detection: What Actually Changes
Most people who turn off their camera alerts do it for the same reason: the alerts were almost never about a person. Here is…
After-Hours Intrusion Alerts That People Keep Switched On
An alerting system is only worth having if the people receiving the alerts still read them in six months. That is a design problem.
Work out the numbers yourself
Two calculators that do the arithmetic installers do on the back of a quote.
How many cameras calculator
Enter your entry points, areas and what you need to recognise, and get a camera count with the reasoning shown.
Open the calculator →Storage & retention calculator
Resolution, frame rate, codec and days of retention, converted into the drive size your recorder needs.
Open the calculator →Local conditions change the answer
Decode the quote in front of you
IP camera
A camera that sends video over a computer network rather than a coaxial cable.
Resolution (2MP, 4MP, 8MP)
The number of pixels in each frame, usually quoted in megapixels.
Pixels per metre
How many horizontal pixels fall across one metre of the scene at a given distance.
Focal length
The lens property, in millimetres, that determines how narrow or wide the view is.
Field of view
The angle of the scene a camera can see, expressed in degrees.
Varifocal lens
A lens whose focal length can be adjusted, so the view can be tuned after mounting.
IR illumination
Infrared light, invisible to people, used by a camera to see in darkness.
Wide dynamic range (WDR)
A camera feature that handles bright and dark areas in the same frame.
Quick answers
How many cameras does my business need?
It depends far less on floor area than on how many places on your site matter. List every entry and exit, every till or stock point, and every area where a dispute could arise, then decide what each view has to prove. As a rough guide a small shop often lands between four and eight cameras and a warehouse between eight and twenty, but the honest answer comes from the walk-through. Our camera count tool steps through it.
What resolution should I choose?
For most business sites 4MP is a sensible default, with 2MP fine for short-distance indoor views and 8MP reserved for wide areas where you need to zoom into recorded footage. Resolution alone does not decide detail, though: the lens, the distance and the lighting matter just as much. Work out the pixels per metre you need at the distance that matters rather than buying by megapixel. The resolution and lens guide shows how.
How long should I keep footage?
Long enough that an incident is still recoverable by the time someone notices it. Many Australian businesses settle between two weeks and three months, and stock loss is often the deciding factor because it can take weeks to show up in a stocktake. Retention is a product of camera count, bitrate, frame rate and drive capacity, so it is a design decision rather than a setting. You can size it with our storage calculator.
Do I need internet for a camera system?
No. A recorder and cameras work entirely on a local network and will keep recording with the internet down. You need a connection only for remote viewing, offsite alerts and remote support, and in that case upload speed is the figure that matters, not download. See the network and bandwidth guide for sizing.
Can AI tell the difference between a person and an animal?
Generally yes, and that is the main practical difference between object detection and ordinary motion detection, which reacts to any pixel change including possums, rain and headlights. Detection is statistical rather than certain, so it will occasionally be wrong in both directions. That is why alerts come with the camera frame attached, so a person can decide in a few seconds. The AI versus motion detection guide compares them.