How an IP camera differs from an analog one: description and differences

When design­ing a video sur­veil­lance sys­tem, engi­neers need to solve a huge num­ber of prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with both lay­ing cables and choos­ing cam­eras direct­ly. More­over, today there are a huge num­ber of their vari­eties on the mar­ket, which fur­ther com­pli­cates the deter­mi­na­tion of the appro­pri­ate type.

But the two types of video sur­veil­lance cam­eras that are most wide­ly used are IP and ana­log. In fact, they occu­py a much larg­er part of the range of mod­els for remote secu­ri­ty shoot­ing. And the deci­sion needs to be made once and for all — because the tran­si­tion from one type to anoth­er requires re-lay­ing cables and buy­ing a new recorder.

To sim­pli­fy the choice, in this arti­cle we will talk about the fact that an IP cam­era is dif­fer­ent from an ana­log one, give a descrip­tion and dif­fer­ences, and also sug­gest in which cas­es it is bet­ter to use cer­tain mod­els.

IP cameras: description

IP-cam­eras appeared on the video sur­veil­lance equip­ment mar­ket rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly — imme­di­ate­ly after the mass dis­tri­b­u­tion of dig­i­tal video cap­ture sen­sors. In fact, they exist for about 15–20 years. And dur­ing this time, IP cam­eras have become one of the most com­mon types of video sur­veil­lance equip­ment.

Each IP cam­era is a com­plete­ly stand­alone device capa­ble of cap­tur­ing video, con­vert­ing it to a tra­di­tion­al dig­i­tal stream (such as MPEG‑4), and then send­ing it over the net­work or record­ing it to built-in media in the form of a dri­ve or mem­o­ry card. In addi­tion, IP cam­eras are con­nect­ed to a local area net­work via an Eth­er­net or Wi-Fi inter­face.

This archi­tec­ture allows open access. You can con­nect to the IP cam­era from any com­put­er on the local net­work or even on the Inter­net (if allowed by the pro­to­col set­tings made by the sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor). In gen­er­al, access set­tings can be very flex­i­ble. It is allowed to place it in a closed net­work, and store the video in an encrypt­ed archive, and trans­fer it to a remote serv­er.

All set­tings for stor­ing mate­r­i­al cap­tured from IP cam­eras are car­ried out by the com­pa­ny’s sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor. So, it can even allo­cate a sin­gle serv­er with unlim­it­ed disk space scal­ing. And if you don’t want to spend mon­ey on an expen­sive archiv­ing sys­tem, you can set up short-term stor­age and use any com­put­er or reg­is­trar for this.

Key advan­tages of IP cam­eras:

1. Unlim­it­ed sur­veil­lance net­work scal­ing. You can con­nect any num­ber of devices, flex­i­bly con­fig­ure them, move, dis­con­nect and recon­nect;

2. Ease of net­work­ing. The cam­eras are con­nect­ed via uni­fied inter­faces — Eth­er­net and Wi-Fi. In places where it is impos­si­ble to con­duct a wire, a wire­less con­nec­tion is allowed;

3. Abil­i­ty to work in an open net­work. To view images and archive data from IP cam­eras, any com­put­er with Inter­net access is enough, and some man­u­fac­tur­ers even offer play­back from a smart­phone or tablet;

4. No cable shield­ing required. Eth­er­net is well pro­tect­ed from inter­fer­ence and inter­fer­ence. Unless when lay­ing near equip­ment with increased induc­tance (any elec­tric motors, includ­ing those installed in machine tools or refrig­er­a­tors), you will need to use a cable with a met­al braid or ground;

5. Suf­fi­cient­ly high image res­o­lu­tion, although it, of course, depends on the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cam­era itself. So, with a 0.3‑megapixel sen­sor, in any case, it will not be pos­si­ble to remove a high­ly detailed “pic­ture”;

6. Sup­port for remote con­trol. Some mod­els of IP cam­eras are equipped with a var­i­fo­cal lens or a ser­vo for rota­tion — and all this can be con­fig­ured remote­ly in live view;

7. No reg­is­trar required. Any com­put­er con­nect­ed to the same net­work can be used as a device for con­trol­ling, switch­ing and record­ing video from IP cam­eras.

Key dis­ad­van­tages of IP cam­eras:

1. High price. As a rule, IP cam­eras are the most expen­sive mod­els on the mar­ket;

2. Seri­ous depen­dence on func­tions. So, you need to care­ful­ly review the char­ac­ter­is­tics — not only the res­o­lu­tion of the sen­sor, but also, for exam­ple, the pres­ence of a ser­vo, infrared illu­mi­na­tion and oth­er para­me­ters;

3. Depen­dence on pro­pri­etary ser­vices. IP cam­eras of many com­pa­nies, such as Dig­ma, Ezviz or even Xiao­mi, only work with pro­pri­etary cloud servers. You can’t con­nect them to your own net­work. Often, pro­pri­etary ser­vices, in addi­tion to a con­tro­ver­sial approach to the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of infor­ma­tion, also require a month­ly fee.

4. In prin­ci­ple, IP cam­eras are easy to install, use and scale the net­work. How­ev­er, they must be cho­sen respon­si­bly. Not only the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the device are impor­tant, but also the abil­i­ty to include IP cam­eras in closed net­works that do not sup­port exter­nal input to pro­tect against infor­ma­tion theft.

Analog cameras: description

Ana­log cam­eras are a clas­sic solu­tion for video sur­veil­lance. They dif­fer in tech­ni­cal and func­tion­al sim­plic­i­ty, being just an image sen­sor with a sig­nal con­vert­er. To con­nect ana­log cam­eras, a coax­i­al cable is used, which is struc­tural­ly sim­i­lar to tra­di­tion­al anten­na wires. This is not sur­pris­ing. Ana­log cam­eras cre­ate an Europe sig­nal.

For ana­log cam­eras to work, a con­nec­tion to a DVR is required. This device takes the sig­nal and re-con­verts it for dis­play and/or fur­ther record­ing.

The com­bi­na­tion of ana­log cam­eras and a DVR cre­ates a closed sys­tem that can­not be con­nect­ed from out­side. This guar­an­tees the high­est con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of infor­ma­tion. DVRs, depend­ing on the mod­el, can not only record video, but also archive it with encryp­tion. It is worth not­ing that the vast major­i­ty of such devices are not equipped with an inter­nal dri­ve, so the hard dri­ve must be pur­chased sep­a­rate­ly. Its char­ac­ter­is­tics lim­it the vol­ume of the records archive.

Just like dig­i­tal cam­eras, ana­log cam­eras come with dif­fer­ent sen­sor res­o­lu­tions. The high­er it is, the more details can be seen on the record­ing. How­ev­er, the design fea­tures of coax­i­al cable sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it the max­i­mum res­o­lu­tion. So, most AHD cam­eras are equipped with a 1280 × 720 pix­el sen­sor.

When lay­ing the wires, you need to take into account that ana­log cam­eras need two cables. Coax­i­al is used for sig­nal trans­mis­sion, and a sep­a­rate one is used for pow­er. High-end dig­i­tal cam­eras can sup­port PoE (Pow­er-over-Eth­er­net) with a sin­gle cable.

Key advan­tages of ana­log cam­eras:

1. Cre­ate a com­plete­ly closed sys­tem. This guar­an­tees high con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of the cap­tured sig­nal and record­ed data. That is why devices of this type are used in orga­ni­za­tions where it is required to pre­vent even autho­rized leaks — banks, pawn­shops, casi­nos;

2. Dif­fer in the low price. As a rule, even AHD cam­eras are inex­pen­sive, so buy­ing many devices for a large net­work (includ­ing a recorder) will not hit the bud­get.

Key dis­ad­van­tages of ana­log cam­eras:

1. Dif­fi­cul­ty in net­work­ing. Each device requires two cables, which, more­over, have a lim­it­ed length. Con­sid­er­ing that the wires are usu­al­ly laid in the walls, the instal­la­tion is done once and for all. In addi­tion, the coax­i­al cable is very sen­si­tive to exter­nal sig­nals and there­fore needs to be shield­ed to pro­tect against inter­fer­ence;

2. The com­plex­i­ty (up to the impos­si­bil­i­ty) of scal­ing the net­work. The max­i­mum num­ber of ana­log cam­eras in the sys­tem is lim­it­ed by the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the recorder. If this device is equipped with 12 inputs, then only 12 units can be con­nect­ed to it;

3. Rel­a­tive­ly low res­o­lu­tion. Often even AHD cam­eras do not pro­vide enough detail to see, for exam­ple, the facial fea­tures of a perime­ter intrud­er.

Thus, the pur­chase of ana­log cam­eras to cre­ate a video sur­veil­lance sys­tem is jus­ti­fied only in very rare cas­es. For exam­ple, if you want to pro­tect data from unau­tho­rized access and / or inter­cep­tion; or if the instal­la­tion bud­get is very lim­it­ed — but the high cost of the instal­la­tion process­es them­selves does not mat­ter.

Analog and IP cameras: comparison

So, hav­ing decid­ed on the char­ac­ter­is­tics and prin­ci­ple of oper­a­tion of each type of cam­era, it is advis­able to com­pare them. Only fea­tures com­mon to each group are con­sid­ered, not spe­cif­ic mod­els.

Thus, in 2020, the use of ana­log cam­eras is in most cas­es inap­pro­pri­ate. How­ev­er, if you want to achieve max­i­mum pri­va­cy and infor­ma­tion pro­tec­tion, it is bet­ter to aban­don the idea of ​​build­ing a video sur­veil­lance sys­tem on IP cam­eras.

Also, when choos­ing an IP cam­era, make sure that it is not bound to its own sur­veil­lance ser­vices. Most often this is observed in mass mod­els. For exam­ple, most devices from Dig­ma, Ezviz and Xiao­mi can­not be con­fig­ured to work on a local net­work — they send a sig­nal to their own serv­er.