You may need to repeat this exercise under different ambient lighting conditions until you get a setting that works right at all times. If your camera offers any additional colour settings, which allow you to adjust parameters such as the image’s hue or gamma levels, adjust these until the colours are no longer distorted.If your camera doesn’t have ATW or AWB support, adjust the white balance manually until the colours are right.If your camera has ATW and AWB support but repositioning it doesn’t help, disable ATW or AWB and adjust the white balance manually until the colours are right.If the colours are distorted only in the presence of a certain type of ambient light, such as street lights during the night, re-position the camera so that it points further away from the light source.

If your camera adjusts white balance automatically (two common names for this feature are ATW - Auto Tracking White Balance - and AWB - Auto White Balance) and it’s installed outdoors, angle it down so that it points further away from the sky.

Sometimes, this won’t be a global setting, but a colour-related setting.

If your camera is rated for both indoors and outdoors use, check its settings and make sure it’s configured for outdoors use.

When it’s not set correctly - and that’s especially common on cameras that can adjust it automatically - it can visibly distort colours. Cameras attempt to do the same thing, through a setting called “white balance”, which can be either manually or automatically adjusted. That’s because our eyes have a fairly wide colour range, and because our brains can compensate, to some extent, for a certain range of ambient lighting parameters. When we look at a white object, our eyes will perceive it as white even if it’s not illuminated by a perfectly white light. If your CCTV camera’s footage reminds of you those peculiar psychedelic rock videos from the 1960s, there’s a good chance it has a problem with the white balance settings. Here are 11 of the most common CCTV problems - and their fixes! Many common CCTV problems are simply a symptom of imperfect installation or incorrect configuration.įortunately, some of these problems are easy to fix. You are bound to run into trouble even with high-end equipment from reputable manufacturers. But no matter how much effort manufacturers put into making their devices operate well without much configuration, some problems still occur.ĭon’t want to deal with CCTV problems on your own? We get it! Give us a call or send us an email and our CCTV specialists in London will fix any issues in record time! Modern CCTV cameras are sturdy, operator-friendly devices, light-years ahead of the finicky and trouble-prone cameras from thirty years ago. Consequently, any CCTV problems should be treated with care.Įven something as innocuous as occasional flickering can hide crucial details from a picture - like a thief’s face or a vehicle’s number plate. Picture quality is one of the essential requirements that the Home Office lists in the UK police requirements guide.

But a CCTV camera’s security guarantees are only as good as the camera’s reliability and the quality of the footage that it produces.

CCTV cameras are a common and cost-effective feature of modern security systems.

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