> One thing that I can't understand is why security camera footage
> is so crappy. When you consider that even a cheap point-and-
> shoot digital camera takes great pictures, it seems remarkable that
> a grainy black and white picture is regarded as acceptable in a
> supposedly high-security building like a bank. Stills I've seen on
> TV are so bad you can't even guess at what the person looks like

It's probably about data storage.
Which in part may be about a refusal to use a decent coding scheme.
We have 2 x Sanyo Xacti's that record to SD cads and use "true" MP4*.
The use of  true MP4  in a product (and certainly not including
various "MP4 like wannabees) is IMHO a sign that the rest of the
device is liable to be well conceived, reasonably featured and built
by people with technical nouse. There will be exceptions.

AFAIR data rate at highest resolution of 640 x 480 at ?30?
frames/second is 1GB in 45 minutes or about
22MB/minute
370 kB/second
3 Mb/s

24 hours at 1 GB/hr = 24 GB (natch) or will fill a 1 TB drive in about 40 days.

You can use far far lower quality and still get results vastly
superior to what is usually displayed after a crime.

Most other CODECs require more to vastly more storage per time than MP4*.


              Russell

aka ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003 and friends
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14
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