Why are surveillance videos from stores, shown on your nightly news, Dateline, AMW, etc.)

[raccoon]

of such poor quality? they're incredibly grainy and indistinct.

[Fumesucker]

1. Recording hours of video requires a great deal of space

Either on VCR tape or DVR, the worse the quality recorded the more recording time you can get on a given medium.

There are other considerations but that's the main one, it's economic, high quality video storage is expensive in terms of the benefit derived from security camera recordings, ie the vast majority are never used for anything at all.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. What a good answer!

I too had wondered about the quality of the cameras, as it is supposed they might be needed to identify someone at some point.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

3. Its not just the compression, its the cameras

To keep the costs down, they use cheap CCDs with limited resolution. They are "good enough" but that is about it.