How do you choose
home security cameras?

Start from the scene, not the count

First define the scenes you care about recording: the main door, the car entrance, the back yard, the farm fence if there is one. Each scene needs one camera designed for it — not a single camera meant to "see everything".

The common mistake is mounting one camera high in a corner to cover the whole yard. The result is an image where a person appears as a dot with no identifiable face — so the camera becomes a witness that an event happened, not to who did it.

Resolution isn't the biggest number

Higher resolution means more detail, but also more storage and a heavier network. For most homes, 4MP is enough for entrances and 2MP for indoor hallways.

What actually makes the difference is not resolution but recognition distance: how far the camera sits from the face you want to identify. An 8MP camera at 25 meters is worse than a 4MP camera at 8 meters.

Night recording is the real test

Most of what matters at home happens at night. Ask about the night-vision type: Infrared gives a black-and-white image, while Color Night Vision needs faint ambient light but preserves the color of clothing and cars — which is what the authorities usually ask for.

And mind the camera's position relative to the light source: a camera facing a strong floodlight will give you a black shadow where the face should be.

Retention period determines disk size

Ask yourself: if something happened while I'm away for two weeks, would I still find the footage? A reasonable home retention period is 30 days.

As a rough rule: an H.265-encoded camera consumes between 0.5 and 1 TB per 30 days — the lower end for a quiet scene with smart encoding enabled, the upper for an entrance with constant motion. So eight cameras need a disk between 6 and 8 TB. Ask for the number calculated on your scene and written into the quote, not "the disk is enough".