You are wrong about the best aspect ratio for surveillance, at least statistically speaking. In the past few years, as HD swept into living rooms, people have moved from watching video on 4:3 aspect ratios to the wider 16:9 format. This has carried over into surveillance where the wide screen HD format has become very popular. Indeed, in a recent reader's survey asking to choose between 4:3 and 16:9, the wide format won in a landslide:

The premise behind 16:9 preference is that most scenes in surveillance are typically wide but not tall (i.e. there are no 10 foot tall people or 30 foot tall trucks, etc.)

Unfortunately, in practice, this assumption, while true, detracts from real world performance.

Our Tests

This surprised us as well but our series of tests, in a variety of real world scenes, showed over and over again clear practical benefits of 'full' 4:3 aspect ratio. These scenes include:

• A small indoor conference room
• An indoor lobby
• An outdoor intersection - with both wide and telephoto FoVs
• An outdoor parking lot - with both wide and telephoto FoVs

These sample images were produced by the same camera, in the same location, switching aspect ratio from 4:3 (1.3 MP - 1280 x 1024) to 16:9 (720p - 1280 x 720).