subject: Should You Use A Day/Night Camera? [print this page] Should You Use A Day/Night Camera? Should You Use A Day/Night Camera?
When designing your surveillance camera system, selecting the right cameras for your application and environment is extremely important. Making sure that your cameras will give you the video that want with the lighting in the area is a key part of this.
Poor lighting conditions make it so that standard security camera are unable to give you video footage that's useful. This is particularly unfortunate because criminal activity often happens at night. In recent years, technological advances in security cameras have allowed for several different solutions for this problem. Some of the types of cameras that can get around this problem are infrared cameras, black and white cameras and relatively recently day/ night cameras. In this article we're going to examine the day/ night cameras more closely.
It's not unusual for criminals to strike at night, but if you have a day/ night camera as part of your security camera system you can still capture quality video in these situations. Day/ night cameras have become very popular in applications where recording good video footage at night is vital and they're becoming more widely available for home use, business purposes and public places. Not too long ago, the cost for any form of night vision camera kept them out of most people's hands. New advances in the science behind them and and in their mass production have changed this, putting these cameras in a price range that most people can afford.
In order to really understand how a day/ night camera works we need to take a closer look at what we think of as darkness. When the level of light has dropped to the point where we can't see clearly then we consider it to be dark, but it this is actually rarely the case. Unless we're talking about being in a confined location with no artificial light, there is usually some light (from the moon, stars or distant man made source) just not at a level that allows us to see clearly. Several types of animals can see much better then we can in the "dark", because their eyes have evolved to gather background illumination much better then us.
Even though our eyes haven't evolved to see as well in the dark as some animals, science has recently made it so that we can actually see better in poor lighting then they can. A day/ night camera works just like a standard security camera when there is enough available light. When the illumination in the area goes below the level where it can produce good video this way, it switches to specialized sensor and it also may remove a filter that blocks infrared light. This extra sensitive sensor works by collecting tiny amounts of light that's available in the area and enhancing it to the point where the human eye can see clearly. The sensors are much more sensitive than our eyes are, it even collects light from the lower end of the infrared light spectrum, which isn't noticeable by the human eye. These cameras are perfect if the environment that's to be under surveillance has some amount of light present it. They will not work in total darkness because, they normally don't have infrared LEDs.
