WYSIWYG CCTV
Thursday, January 8th, 2009Traditional CCTV security cameras provide WYSIWYG results.
WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get
In an era when the general public are well practised at snapping away with compact digital cameras (and even with their mobile phones), and ending up with multi-megapixel images which they can later crop, enlarge, enhance, etc. it is frustrating to capture images that you cannot improve.
The above image is captured from a fresh crime in Bolton.
It’s a good image.
The focus is good.
The subject is large.
The field of view (width of scene) is not too great.
The colour rendition seems good.
There are more images at the Lancashire News website.
You can almost see a lot of detail inside the shop.
But still the Police are unable to recognise or identify the individuals – Police are appealing for anybody who might recognise the men in the pictures:
I would appeal to anyone who recognises the clothing
If you’d captured these stills with your multi-megapixel compact digital hand-held point & shoot camera you’d just zoom-in to the captured image and reveal their faces, but with traditional CCTV (even if it’s recorded on a hard disc based digital video recorder DVR) there is no more detail to be had.
What you see is what was captured and recorded.
Zooming-in will just move the limited number of pixels apart.
Scotland Yard could do no more with it.
There is no ‘more’.
The best traditional CCTV security cameras can deliver a maximum of only 0.4 megapixels.
Very often only 50% of that original maximum image quality is actually recorded.
