Camera planner questions, answered
All 9 questions
Type an address, drop security cameras and talk-down speakers on a satellite map, and stretch each coverage cone until it watches what you need. The planner shows how far every camera can recognize a face, simulates what a person looks like at any spot in the cone, and previews the scene from street level where imagery exists. When the layout looks right, you send it to Blinkless and we quote the installation.
PPF is how many of a camera’s horizontal pixels land on one foot of scene at a given distance. It decides what the footage is good for: at 100 PPF you can identify a stranger’s face, at 50 PPF you can recognize someone you know or read a license plate, and at 10 PPF you can tell a person from a vehicle. The planner shades every coverage cone with these bands. Switch a camera to metric and the same figure reads as PPM, pixels per meter.
Resolution is how many pixels the camera’s sensor spreads across its view. More pixels across the same angle put more pixels on a face at any distance, so a higher-resolution camera holds Face ID and Identify quality further out. Change the resolution in the planner and every coverage band recomputes; multi-sensor cameras keep their native resolution because their pixels are fixed per lens.
HAoV is how wide a slice of the scene the lens sees, measured in degrees. A narrow angle concentrates the sensor’s pixels into a small area, which buys long reach; a wide angle covers more ground at lower pixel density. Each camera type in the planner allows a realistic HAoV range for its lens, and dragging a cone’s edge changes the angle the same way editing the field does.
Distance is how far the coverage cone reaches from the camera; Width is how wide the scene is at that far edge. They are tied together through the lens angle, and both are tied to PPF: stretch the cone further or wider and the same pixels spread thinner. The four linked fields — Distance, PPF, Width and HAoV — always agree, so editing any one moves the others.
Coverage is modeled from typical specifications for each class of hardware, using the same lens math the video surveillance industry uses. That is enough to plan a layout and compare cameras. Walls, trees and mounting height change a real view, so a Blinkless site survey confirms the final design before anything is installed.
Yes. Cameras go anywhere on the map: a rooftop, a courtyard, the middle of a parking lot. Street-level imagery, where it exists, only powers an optional preview of the scene. Your quote uses the exact map position either way.
Yes. The planner is free, works in your browser, and needs no account. Requesting an installation quote at the end is optional.
Remote guarding pairs the cameras you plan here with live operators who watch them. When someone enters your property after hours, an operator sees it as it happens, speaks to the intruder through an on-site speaker, and dispatches police when they don’t leave. Most properties get better coverage than a single on-site guard provides, at a fraction of the cost.
The other free tools
- Banned camera checker — before you buy the cameras you just planned, check the brand is not on the FCC Covered List, caught by NDAA Section 889, or covered by Canada’s Hikvision order. The lists reach the budget labels built on that hardware too.
- Guard cost calculator — what this layout replaces. Prices a guard post from BLS wages by state or Job Bank wages by province, with the burden and margin shown line by line.
- Canadian verified response rules — if the property is in Canada, whether police attend your alarm at all depends on your city’s verification rule. Eight police services, each linked to its bylaw.
- US trespass authorization database — if the problem is people who keep coming back, most US cities let you pre-authorize police to remove them when nobody is on site. Every city calls the form something different.