How to choose the right CCTV for your HDB or condo

Most homeowners approach CCTV as a shopping problem: which camera, how many megapixels, which brand. In our experience the specification barely matters compared to where the cameras end up pointing. A modest camera in the right position beats an excellent camera in the wrong one, every time.

Start with the entry points, not the rooms

Almost everything you would ever want to review passes through a doorway. In a typical four-room flat that means the main door, the service yard door if you have one, and the corridor connecting the bedrooms. Cover those three and you have covered the meaningful ground.

Cameras pointed at the middle of a living room feel thorough and deliver very little. Anyone who entered the room came through a door you were not watching.

Resolution only matters at distance

A 2K camera identifies a face reliably out to roughly four metres. Past that you are recording that an event happened, not who did it. This is the single most useful fact in domestic CCTV and the one most often ignored.

The practical implication is that you should place cameras close to where identification matters, rather than high in a corner where they see everything indistinctly. A camera at chest height beside the main door produces a usable face. The same camera in the ceiling corner produces the top of a head.

Light, not darkness, is the hard problem

Night vision is largely a solved problem. Infrared illumination gives you a usable monochrome image in a completely dark room. What defeats cameras is contrast: a camera looking at your front door with bright afternoon corridor light behind it will meter for the corridor and render the person in the doorway as a silhouette.

The fix is positional. Point the camera with the light, not into it. If the geometry of the flat makes that impossible, specify a camera with wide dynamic range and expect to spend time on the exposure settings.

HDB rules, briefly

Cameras installed inside your own unit do not require approval. Cameras mounted outside your unit, facing the common corridor, are subject to HDB and Town Council rules and generally require permission, usually in the context of an ongoing dispute or a police report.

Doorbell cameras at your own door do not require HDB approval, which is a large part of why they have become the default first purchase for flat owners.

A sensible starting configuration

• A doorbell camera at the main door. Sees who arrives, who leaves, and what was left on the floor.
• One indoor camera covering the entry hallway, mounted at head height rather than in the ceiling corner.
• One indoor camera covering the corridor to the bedrooms.
• A fourth camera at the service yard if you have one.

That is four cameras and it covers a four-room flat properly. Adding four more will not make it meaningfully safer. Moving the existing four might.