PoE IP Cameras for Building Surveillance

Why one platform matters more than one good camera

A building rarely needs one kind of camera. The entrance needs a form that reads faces at eye level, the car park needs wide coverage that is hard to reach and hard to smash, the loading dock needs to follow a vehicle, and the lift car needs something flush that survives the door closing on it. If each position comes from a different platform, you end up with four apps, four password sets and four firmware paths.

Every camera on this page shares the same 5 MP sensor, the same F1.0 optics, the same H.265+ encoder and the same ONVIF / RTSP / GB28181 interface. That means one recorder, one client and one night-vision behaviour to learn — and it means a dome added in year three behaves exactly like the bullet installed on day one.

Which form goes where

• Bullet — perimeter, fence line, car park edges and long corridors. Aimed, obvious, and a deterrent in its own right.
• Dome — lobbies, corridors, retail floors and reception. The direction is not obvious from the floor, which is usually what you want indoors.
• PTZ — large yards, loading areas and multi-lane access roads where one camera has to cover a moving target over distance.
• Vandal-resistant housing — lift lobbies, car parks, stairwells and any position at arm's reach. The housing is a separate selection from the camera.
• Board-level module — OEM and integrator builds where the camera goes inside your own housing, and a 38 × 38 mm board is what fits.

PoE and cabling: the arithmetic that decides the switch

Each camera takes one CAT6 run and draws power from the same cable that carries its video, so the switch does double duty. Standard PoE carries power and data 100 m, which covers most floors if you place the switch in the floor's communications room rather than at the far end of the building. Where a run genuinely exceeds 100 m — a car park barrier, a distant gate house — an extend-mode port carries 10 Mbps and power up to 250 m instead of adding a mid-span device.

Budget the switch by wattage, not just by port count. Our 8, 16 and 24 port models carry 120 W, 250 W and 320 W class budgets. Add up the draw of every camera on the switch, allow roughly 25 percent headroom, and pick the model above that number.

What the low-light specification actually buys you

Every camera here is rated to 0.1 Lux in colour at F1.0, and to 0 Lux in black and white with the fill light on. In practice that means a lit car park, a corridor with emergency lighting or a street with intermittent lamps stays in colour, so clothing, vehicle paint and signage remain recognisable in the recording.

It is worth being precise about the limit: below 0.1 Lux the camera still works, but it falls back to its own illumination and to black and white. If your site has genuinely no light at all, read the night vision comparison pages before you specify, and ask us for sample footage from a comparable position.