How To Buy The Perfect Dvr For Your Home And Office

Making a firm decision to install a security system at your location is the first step to safeguard your premises with video surveillance. The next thing you would need is decide upon the type of video recorder. The most popular one is the digital video recorder often known as “DVR”.

To select the perfect DVR for your purpose, you need to keep many things in mind. The most important ones are listed below:

Number of Channels

The most basic question is which areas you want to monitor with your surveillance system. Monitor these areas and determine how many cameras each of these areas need. This analysis of your property will give you the total number of cameras you need, which is then essential to choose how many channels you need in your digital video recorder.

To start with, a 4 channel digital video recorder can store and process video from 4 security cameras. Similarly, an 8 channel security DVR will support 8 security cameras and a 16 channel DVR will support 16 cameras. A 4 channel security DVR is enough to monitor a small store or essential entry points around your home. You can go for wide angle lens cameras or PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras when choosing 4 channel DVR as with less number of cameras you’ll be able to monitor more area. When you go for 8 channel DVR, it gives you some room for expansion in the future. You can choose fixed lens dome security cameras or bullet security cameras. For large villas and companies, 16 channel DVR and 32 channel DVR would be more suitable because of the increased number of cameras.

Size of Hard Disk

Next factor on the list is the size of the hard disk space. First, make sure your digital video recorder comes with pre-installed hard disk space. Otherwise, it would incur as an extra expense to buy the storage space. Then, look for the size of the disk space. You would need more disk space for more number of channels. Resolution, frames per second, video output format, all hugely impact the network bandwidth requirements. It is best to calculate the required storage space beforehand and then choose the DVR that provides you the desired disk space. There are many free storage calculators online that can give you a rough estimate of your desired disk space.

Networkability

The last but not the least, you need to determine if your DVR is able to stream video over the internet. With remote viewing, anyone with the permitted access can view the security footage from anywhere in the word. This will eliminate the need to purchase additional monitors to view the footage. This way, you’d be able to keep remote backups of your security footage as well which prove as a solid video proof in case of ambiguous events.

Offloading of your security video from the DVR is another important factor. Some DVRs allow the users to export the footage onto a flash drive and others have built in CD or DVD burners.

That’s it for now! Now you know the important factors while choosing the digital video recorders, you can make an informed decision. Keep following this space to get more updates on the latest security industry trends.