1000TVL, HD or NOT HD?

I had a conversation with a customer recently (lets call him Adam) who had bought several 1000TVL cameras from another company, and wanted a suitable recorder. During our chat it became obvious Adam thought these cameras were high definition – in fact that is what he had been led to believe by his supplier.

He provided me with a link to where he purchased the cameras and it clearly said

The 1.3MP sensor give the s display picture a True HD picture with display resoultion of 720p

The above is actually a true statement – however it is very mis-leading.

Basically 1000TVL cameras do have resolutions of about 1.3MP – and if you were to connect them directly in to a display monitor which could show the full image, this image would be high definition. However, 1000TVL is a standard definition analogue format camera – which only works with analogue recorders, these recorders have a maximum recording of 960H which is about 500,000 pixels – no where near 1.3MP or HD!

Just to be sure, I connected one of our 1000TVL cameras into a Hikvision HD-TVI recorder today to check if it would detect the camera as HD or PAL (PAL being standard definition) – and I’m afraid it will only record these cameras at standard definition resolutions.

So although it is possible to get a HD image from these cameras – according to our testing, it is NOT possible to ever record a HD image from these cameras via a CCTV recorder, so should they be sold as HD or NOT? that is the question!