Razor sharp digital video cameras are now available that are well within the reach of the average pocketbook and good quality Hi-8 cameras have been available for over 10 years now. Given that this is the case, why are cameras for mission critical work like bank security such incredibly poor quality and the images look like you’re peering through 3 layers of gauze.
Here is a perfect example of the genre.
Bicyclist with $17,000 arrested
Why are bank security pictures so poor?
Cheap cameras with low resolution. Most likely, the equipment was installed years ago and there is no reason to upgrade.
I’ve wondered that myself.
One answer I was told, by the manager for a store that used a closed-circuit TV/VCR setup, was that the owners recycled the tapes after a set time. One cassette was recorded, rewound and rerecorded multiple times. Eventually the tape degraded to the point image quality dropped off sharply.
The same went for the VCR itself- dust and wear damaged the heads over time. And in both cases, the owners of the store, having never been robbed yet, wouldn’t budget any spare cash for new tapes or new recorders on a regular basis.
A second answer is that the recorders are set for “super long play”, in order to try and cram (in the case of a convenience store) 12 to 24 hours into a single cassette.
And third, the cameras are cheap. Yeah, you and I can buy a digital camcorder for less than a grand, but banks and convenience stores are buying cameras that cost $100 per or less. (Since, naturally, they don’t need sound, or telephoto/wide angle features and a bunch of other fluff.)
I’d be interested to hear from an actual security-system person… Heck, if I owned a bank, I’d have high-rez cameras hooked to a huge UPS-equipped bank of interconnected and self-resetting hard drives. (RAIDs?)
Sure, it’d cost more, but if I’m robbed, I want broadcast-quality shots of the perps. 
Nah, the equipment is usually fine. The ‘fuzziness’ you see is the fact that what you’re looking at is a cropped and blown up section of the entire frame.
The original camera image is often a shot of an entire area, but the photo that is printed is just the one guy, blown up into a large image.
“Why are bank robber pictures so fuzzy and poor quality?”
Because people of poor quality and fuzzy faces tend to robbery.
Actually, Doc Nickel and Sam Stone are BOTH right :).
The store I used to work at had fairly decent quality cameras - the monitors produced very clear/sharp images, but the VCR’s they used produced low-quality pictures, for the reasons Doc Nickel cited - 24 hours of video being crammed onto a 6-hour tape, the VCR being in 24-hour usage without being cycled or cleaned, etc.
When we did have a robbery (a group of people used the “Let’s browse the high-end jewelry while our buddies distract the counter worker” routine and snatched nearly $75,000 in jewelry), the image that was published was of a man’s head. On the video that head took up maybe 1/30th or less of the available picture area, but it was blown up and published/broadcast.
Since the source was poor to begin with, the blow-up magnified the image issues 100 times over - just like Sam Stone said.
critter42
Well, I’m inclined to say that Muffin is right. Many is the time I have been out walking with my wife and noticed fuzzy people and I knew that they were evil doers up to no good.
…of course, soon after seeing them my wife usually says, “TV, would you clean your glasses? I don’t know how you can see out of those dirty things!”
Also, keep in mind that for a fixed (stationary) camera, you need to keep it on a pretty wide angle in order to catch the maximum area that something might happen in. That means when something does happen, it’s going to be fairly far away from the camera itself. Also, four cameras might be split-screened onto a single monitor, and that image is what is taped. This further reduces the size of the image by 75%.
As for the expense issue, I worked Asset Protection for a major retail chain (let’s call it Bullseye), and they traditionally had tiny budgets. Why? Upper management views AP as a drain on the budget, becuase they do not actually make money. Sure, they prevent money from walking out the door, but that’s different, apparently. The budget for new equipment was miniscule. For VCRs, we were only allowed to purchase old display models from the sales floor, for example. This si the kind of quality we’re talking about.
I suspect banks are no different.
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Justin
Like Sam Stone said, a lot of times you’re seeing a face picked out of a wide-screen image. If you look at a typical security camera image, it’s going to cover most of a room, not just one guy. While a lot of shows (CSI, as much as I like the show, is a big offender) have detectives use magical image enhancement that lets you zoom in and get more detail, zooming in on real video gets fuzzy, eventually ending up in pixels or smears.