How to Choose CCTV Cameras for Your Home | Falcon Security Systems

Working out what you actually need before you shop

The mistake most people make at home is starting from resolution. Resolution only decides how much detail a camera captures inside the area it can already see — it does not widen that area. Start instead with a list of the points you care about: the front door, the garage, the stairwell, the balcony that overlooks the street. Each of those is one camera, and each has a different distance and lighting problem to solve.

A 2MP camera is genuinely enough for a hallway or a small room. You want 5MP where you need to identify a face or read a number plate at four or five metres — the entrance gate, the garage ramp. Paying for 5MP on an indoor corridor camera buys you nothing except a bigger hard drive bill, because higher resolution eats storage.

Lens size matters more than most buyers realise. A 2.8mm lens gives a wide view of a room but makes anything past six metres small and hard to identify. A 3.6mm lens narrows the view and pushes useful detail further out. For a villa gate you often want 6mm. Getting this wrong is the single most common reason people say "the camera is useless, I can see someone but not who".

A realistic home checklist

• Front door and main entrance — highest priority, use the sharper camera here
• Garage or car parking area — plan for night, this is where most incidents happen
• Stairwell or internal corridor — a wide lens is fine, resolution can be modest
• Any balcony or window reachable from a neighbouring roof
• A DVR position that is not itself easy to reach and steal