By Lunarlink Team
A short field guide to camera selection for commercial sites — how to avoid paying for resolution and analytics you'll never use.
Most camera quotes we see are written backwards. The installer picks a product family based on what they've been trained to sell, then pads the count until the drawing looks covered. Scene and purpose — the two things that actually determine what you need — show up nowhere in the specification.
Start with the opposite question: what event do you need to be able to investigate? A loading dock theft at 3am is a different sensor from a lobby visitor-verification camera. Put that question to any installer you're evaluating, and a good one will ask three or four follow-ups before naming a model.
Resolution follows from that. 4K in a 30-foot corridor is almost always overkill; 4K looking down a warehouse aisle is often correct. Wider dynamic range matters more than megapixels when you're fighting backlight from a glass lobby. None of this is on the spec sheet — it's on the site walk.
Analytics are the next trap. Every vendor's marketing page promises loitering detection, people counting, and license plate recognition. In practice, each of those needs specific placement, framing, and lighting to actually work. Ask for a live demo on a camera similar to yours before you pay for the license.
The durable test: can the installer explain, in one sentence, why each camera is where it is? If the answer is "coverage," you're paying for someone else's template.
