4K Video in Today’s Video Surveillance Systems

Although 4K video offers surveillance applications several major advantages in terms of video resolution and frame rate, it has a few limitations that may slow down the roll out of the technology for security and surveillance applications.

4K offers four times the resolution of 1080p HDTV. This added resolution can drastically improve identifying an individual, a vehicle’s license plate, or crucial details in the camera’s field of view. However, to support 4K video, several other components must be considered such as network bandwidth, video storage capacity, and viewing stations/monitors. Implementing 4K video in a security camera system will require much more transmission bandwidth, more storage capacity on the recording servers and 4K compliant monitors to view the video.  In many cases implementing 4K video means a complete network upgrade just to support the increased bandwidth.

For most users, putting these pieces together could be challenging. For example even if you have a 4K camera and your network and recording server has the capacity to support it, but your desk top monitor is not 4K, you will not be able to take advantage of 4K higher resolution.

Despite the challenges facing the technology, certain organizations can still benefit from the increased resolution such as law enforcement, banks and gas stations and should not be deterred in exploring this option.