REC 00:00:00
CAM 01 – Parkade
Most commercial camera systems are sold on megapixel count and installed by eye. The result is a system that records everything and identifies nobody — useful for knowing that something happened, useless for proving who did it.
The Harvester Road and North Service Road corridors hold a long run of mid-size manufacturers and packagers — buildings in the 20,000 to 100,000 square foot range, usually owner-occupied, often with the same ownership for decades. That profile produces a particular pattern: capable systems installed fifteen years ago, still running, now unsupported and impossible to get footage out of in a usable format. Migration planning matters more here than greenfield design.
Long-tenured owner-occupiers running ageing systems. Export format and evidentiary usability are frequently the actual problem, not coverage.
IEC 62676-4 defines four levels of what a camera can deliver, measured in pixels across a metre of the scene. It is the only spec that predicts whether an image will stand up.
| Level | Pixel density | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Detection | 25 px/m | Something is there. No detail. |
| Observation | 62.5 px/m | Clothing, general behaviour, direction. |
| Recognition | 125 px/m | You can tell it is someone you already know. |
| Identification | 250 px/m | A stranger can be identified from the image alone. |
Published lux ratings are measured at settings nobody uses — slow shutter, high gain, aperture wide open. A camera rated 0.01 lux may be unusable at that light level once the shutter is fast enough to stop a walking person. Specify by sensor size and aperture, and treat quoted IR range as a detection figure rather than an identification one.
H.265 typically halves the bitrate of H.264 at equivalent visual quality, and smart-codec modes cut it further on static scenes. Both choices cascade into storage, switch uplinks and any remote viewing over a business internet connection — which is where most systems actually fall over.
A camera that reboots at night is almost always a power problem, not a camera problem. Heaters, wipers, IR illuminators and PTZ motors all draw at once in February.
| Standard | Budget at the switch | Available at the camera | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 802.3af (PoE) | 15.4 W | 12.95 W | Fixed dome or bullet, no heater |
| 802.3at (PoE+) | 30 W | 25.5 W | Outdoor housing with heater and IR |
| 802.3bt Type 3 | 60 W | 51 W | PTZ, multi-sensor |
| 802.3bt Type 4 | 100 W | 71 W | Heated PTZ, illuminator arrays |
Switch budget is the total across all ports, not per port — a 24-port switch rated 370 W cannot run 24 PoE+ cameras. Ethernet is also limited to a 100 m channel; longer runs need fibre or a mid-span injector.
Retention you can actually prove, on hardware built for it
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Credentials that cannot be copied in a parking lot
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Alarms that mean something, so someone still answers them
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Protection on day one, before there is power or a fence
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Someone watching, not just something recording
Read more →It is the wrong question. Start from what each area has to deliver — identification at doors and tills, recognition in aisles, detection across a yard — and the count falls out of the pixel-density calculation. Warehouses are usually over-covered on the floor and under-covered at the dock doors, which is where the losses happen.
Only where the extra pixels land on something that matters. Over a wide yard, 4K buys real detail. On a corridor already at 250 px/m it buys storage cost and nothing else. The decision is made per camera position, not per system.
Often, if they are ONVIF Profile S conformant. Age matters less than conformance and whether they still deliver the pixel density their position needs. We audit what is there before proposing replacement.
Long-tenured owner-occupiers running ageing systems. Export format and evidentiary usability are frequently the actual problem, not coverage. The Harvester Road and North Service Road corridors hold a long run of mid-size manufacturers and packagers — buildings in the 20,000 to 100,000 square foot range, usually owner-occupied, often with the same ownership for decades.