Closed Circuit Televisions

Posts Tagged ‘Explained’

With so many new technological advances being introduced to the consumer in the home security systems market, it can be more then a little difficult to keep up. So, how does all this stuff work and will it be obsolete in just a few short years? What about all the crazy names such as “infrared”? What the heck does it mean anyway?

Of all the equipment that you can buy for your business or home security system, the one item that has fallen most dramatically in cost is the infrared security camera. If you think that starting prices of around $175 is high then be thankful that you didn’t have to buy them twenty years ago when you couldn’t touch an infrared detection camera for less than $5000.

Quite simply, the way that they work is that they see heat radiation instead of common light. So how do they do this? The technology that is involved is quite complex but it has to do with the actual wavelengths of the infrared radiation that your body gives off.

The “infra” part of the name “infrared”, actually comes from the Latin word “infra”, which translates directly into the English word “below”. The reason it is used to describe heat radiation, is because red is the color of visible light with the longest wavelength.

One way to gain a better picture in your head, is to refer back to the times that you were traveling down a long desert highway. Perhaps you can recall looking far ahead down the highway and seeing “blurry waves” emanating up off of the hot road and you may have called them “heat waves”.

What those were was radiation that was in the infrared wavelength. So if you can see heat waves with your eyes in these extreme cases, its not hard to imagine that a finely calibrated infrared camera would also be able to see them coming off of a persons body.