Fault-finding
The picture looks worse than it should
Settings and placement cause more bad pictures than bad cameras. The three usual culprits: the phone app showing a low-resolution substream rather than what is actually recorded, a camera staring into backlight from a bright doorway or glass front, and a recorder bitrate wound down to stretch storage. Check all three before pricing new cameras.
Last reviewed
Compare the phone view with recorder playback
Remote apps deliberately show a small substream so the picture survives mobile data, which means the phone view is worse than the recording by design. Play the same scene back on the recorder's own screen or a directly connected monitor. If playback is sharp, the cameras are fine and only the app stream needs adjusting — or accepting. The gap between the two surprises nearly everyone who checks.
Take backlight out of the frame
A camera aimed at the glass frontage of a markaz shop spends the whole day fighting the sky, and every person walking in becomes a silhouette. Re-angling the camera away from the brightest area, or enabling wide dynamic range where the camera supports it, recovers faces that no resolution upgrade would. In this situation placement beats megapixels every single time, and the fix costs a visit, not a camera.
Check the bitrate and encoding page
Retention sometimes gets stretched by quietly lowering the bitrate, which leaves the resolution number looking impressive while smearing detail the moment anything moves. Open the encoding settings: a 2MP channel wants roughly 2 Mbps, and a 4MP channel proportionally more. Restoring a sane bitrate costs storage days, so if both retention and quality matter, the honest answer is a larger drive in the same job.
Why is my CCTV picture quality so poor?
Will a 4MP camera fix a bad 2MP picture?
Only when resolution is genuinely the limit. Backlight, a dirty dome and a starved bitrate ruin a 4MP picture just as thoroughly. Fix those first, then upgrade if faces or number plates still need more pixels.
Why did quality drop after cameras were added?
Extra channels often prompt someone to lower the bitrate so the old drive still holds enough days. The cameras have not changed — restore the bitrate and add storage.
Rather have it done?
Security camera repair covers black screens, recorders that stopped writing, lost phone access after an internet change, and footage that will not play back. Most faults trace to power, connectors or settings rather than a dead camera. Callout in Islamabad or Rawalpindi starts at PKR 3,000, with the full fix priced before any work.
Security camera repair in Islamabad — prices and scope