Installing some outdoor security cameras in your front yard, backyard, or house exterior might be a tricky business. First, it can help you to be more aware of the surrounding environment around the house which allows you to detect any suspicious movements outside and help you catch the burglars once they are properly recorded in the security footage. But, on the other hand, the quality of the outdoor security cameras itself matters in determining whether you can successfully monitor your house 24/7 or not.
This is why you need to install only good outdoor security cameras if you want to ensure maximum protection from intruders. Here are 7 characteristics of a good outdoor security camera:
1. It Has a Clear Image and Video Output
Since you will place these outdoor cameras relatively high above the ground, it means that it will record videos from a long distance. So, what you need to ensure is that the image and video output generated by the surveillance footage should be clear and have high resolution. It is no longer useful for you to use low resolution cameras in this day and age as the footage will be blurry and difficult to analyze, especially when it is recording during the night.
2. It Can Record the Footage in Stable Frames
Many outdoor surveillance cameras that are available in the market today, especially those cheap and low quality products, will provide choppy footage and sometimes bad frame rates for the video, especially when it needs to be transmitted over the wireless network that has an unstable and unreliable connection. What you need to do is to choose the cameras that can record footage in stable frames without any lag or choppiness when you play the footage. Also, you need to ensure that it has a good upload speed using the wireless network.
3. It Can be Hidden from Sight
Don’t pick the outdoor security cameras that are bulky, heavy, and obvious when you put it in plain sight. It should be easy to hide from plain sight because sometimes you don’t want the intruders to know that you have installed some surveillance cameras outside. A good outdoor security camera should have a nice design that can easily blend with the environment so that people won’t suspect the real function of the device.
4. It Has a Wide Field of View
When picking some outdoor surveillance devices to be installed on your backyard or front yard, be sure to check if the lens can cover a wide field of view or not. If it has a wide-angle lens, it will be able to cover a wider field of view, meaning that you don’t need to install lots of surveillance devices in one area. You can put a few monitoring devices in strategic places so that you can cover the whole area easily.
5. It Has the Night Vision Feature
The night vision feature will be useful when the outdoor cameras are used to record footage during the night. Often, you might have difficulty detecting intruders that operate at night because your surveillance system cannot really detect them. They don’t have the night vision feature, and the environment is dark. So, they can simply hide around the shadows and bushes to cover their track. But, with the night vision feature, you can simply see those suspicious movements event though the outdoor environment is dark.
6. It Has Constant Support from the Brand
While you might argue that purchasing a good security camera is not a matter of choosing the right brand, but it is instead a matter of functionality, choosing the right brand will help you a lot in using such an equipment for long-term. A good brand will support their products for years and years in the future, and they might even give 2-3 years warranty for their products just to ensure that they can work for long-term. So, choosing good outdoor security cameras should involve selecting the brand that is willing to support their products for years in the future.
7. It Can Save High Quality Videos in Small Sizes
Because you need to make an archive of your surveillance footage, and because the storage space is limited, you might only be allowed to store footage for up to a week or a month. But, it can expanded a lot more if your security cameras can just compress the videos in small sizes without losing much of its quality. Thus, it won’t take lots of bandwidth to upload the footage, and it also won’t take lots of space to store them. So, you should choose the surveillance device that has this feature.