Which cameras are best suited for indoors retail store?
4mp or 5mp ideally suited or others?
Needing several cameras.
4 looking along aisles of store (approx 5m distance)
2 above till points (looking directly Down)
4 in store rooms covering full room
1 exterior camera to cover both day and night (low light in evenings/overnight)
16 ch NVR
Remote Access also required.
These are very simple requirements. Pretty much any system will do what you want. Because it’s likely you’ll never use the cameras with the lights off you don’t need to worry about sensor sensitivity so much, or even infra red capability. As such, I’d probably go with 8MP cameras and choose the lenses based on the viewing angles you want. You say you only want one outside but realistically you want to cover both sides of your frontage. Those cameras will likely need to be waterproof but the others not so much. For retail I would strongly suggest a camera as people enter the store with a public view screen so they can see themselves and KNOW they’re being surveiiled.
In this scenario I’d be tempted to go with HDCVI cameras rather than IP because you can save money on the cameras and spend more on a powerful AI recorder. People tend to get very caught up in the whole ‘old technology’ thing with HDCVI but in truth they’re generally better cameras for a fraction of the money.
On the recorder do you need integration with the tills? I look after a chain of kebab shops in East Anglia and they have point-of-sale integration which is great because you can see not only the till and operator but also what the operator entered into the till so it can do basic stock controls as well. And when a customer says they paid with a £20 you can see it. Or that they actually paid with a £10 note. Those cameras you want to be vari-focal so you can zoom in on the till area.
For the store rooms I would suggest 360 fisheye cameras in the centre of the ceiling. But you would need a recorder capable of deskewing 4 cameras.
Do you want analytics ie. How many people come in and out of each area/aisle? What about facial recognition for picking up known miscreants when they enter your store? If you’re in neighbourhood watch you may want the ability to search the captured images for gender, coat colour, trousers colour, hair colour, beards, glasses etc.
And if you want remote access don’t skimp on the broadband connection. You want a minimum of 100Mbps upload speed because your images are being streamed from the store, not to it. And you will require off-premises backup to ensure no-one can accidentally pour a glass of water over the recorder after they’ve helped themselves to a case of something from the stores.
There are a huge number of options and this is the sort of thing you can make a really expensive mistake with. Just get three quotes from local surveillance installers and then if you want to do the install yourself you’ll have an informed view of what you’re buying. And don’t forget to register with the ICO and put up lots of signage.
