Where to Place Cameras on a Shop Floor: Sightlines and Light, Not Wall Coverage

Place each shop-floor camera on a specific job — a work zone, an entry/exit, a hazard, or an identification choke point — and give it the pixels on target that job needs. Mount overview cameras at working sightline height, angle them 15–30° down, and point them away from windows and open doors so faces and machines stay lit, not silhouetted.

The right question is never "how many cameras per square metre." It's "what does each camera have to see, and does it have the resolution to see it there?" Get that right and a handful of cameras beat a floor full of evenly-spaced ones.

Key takeaways

• Ignore the "one camera per 1,000 sq ft / every 40 m" ratio. It buys evenly-blurred coverage that can't identify anyone.
• Assign every camera one job, then size it by pixels-on-target — the DORI standard (IEC 62676-4).
• On high-bay Indian sheds, stop chasing a "3–4 m" mounting rule; mount to columns at working height and let pixels-per-metre, not height, decide the placement.
• The most common placement failure is backlight — a camera aimed at a window or open roller door. Placement beats WDR, and WDR is not free.
• Coverage = placement × power. A PoE switch with no UPS goes dark on the first outage and covers nothing.

The density myth to kill first

Most CCTV specs — and most of the SERP — start from a ratio: one camera per 1,000 sq ft, one every 40–50 m along a line, 20% field-of-view overlap. That is how a factory ends up with 24 cameras and still can't tell you who walked out with the tooling. A camera placed to satisfy an area ratio, with no job assigned, produces evenly-spread, evenly-useless footage.

The metric that actually matters is pixels on the target, codified in IEC 62676-4 (the DORI standard):

So the question at every mount point is not "am I covering this floor evenly?" but "does this camera put ~250 px/m on the choke point where I need to identify people, and ~25–62 px/m across the zone where I only need to see activity?" Area ratios can't answer that. Sightlines and lens choice can.

Assign each camera one job

Before you mount anything, decide what each camera is for. On a shop floor there are four jobs, and they place differently:

A camera trying to do all four does none well. One primary job per camera, placed for that job.

Mounting height and angle — for a high-bay shed, not a shop ceiling

The internet's consensus figure is 8–12 ft (2.5–4 m) at 15–30° down. Those are fine rules of thumb for a low-ceiling room. They fall apart in a typical Indian factory, which is a high-bay shed with a 6–10 m roof truss and nothing to bolt to at 3 m.

Don't chase the height number there. Do this instead:

• Mount to structure at working height. Drop cameras on a down-pole or pendant, or fix them to columns and corners at ~2.4–3 m, where the pilot below put them.
• Switch the metric from height to pixels-per-metre. A 2 MP camera looking down a 30 m aisle can't identify anyone at the far end regardless of angle — it's below the 250 px/m identify band within a few metres. Height is a means; ppm on the target is the goal.
• Keep identification cameras low — roughly 2–2.5 m at the choke point, angled so faces fill the frame. Too high and you record scalps, not faces.
• Angle overview cameras 15–30° down. Straight down sees a small circle; a moderate tilt sees far more useful floor while still catching detail near the mount.

How to avoid backlight and glare

The single most common placement mistake is aiming a camera at a light source — a window, an open roller-shutter door, a bright lamp. The result is a silhouette: everything in front goes black. This one error wrecks more footage than every blind spot combined.

• Point cameras away from windows and exterior doors, not toward them. Put the bright opening behind or beside the camera.
• WDR helps, but it isn't free. Aggressive wide-dynamic-range blending drops effective framerate and adds motion blur, so a WDR camera aimed at a bright roller door will still smear a moving forklift or a person walking out. Placement beats WDR every time.
• India-specific compounders: open sheds flip from bright daylight to dark interior at the doorway; dust and monsoon film on the lens or dome amplify IR bounce at night; and a doorway that's fine at noon backlights hard by 3 pm as the sun swings. Aim for the worst light of the day, not the calm mid-morning you happen to survey in.

Turret (ceiling) vs bullet (wall)

Both belong on a floor. Pick per job, not one type everywhere.

The turret's flat lens avoids the IR reflection a glass dome suffers at night, especially once the bubble is dusty or scratched — which, in a grinding or textile bay, is a matter of weeks. A practical floor is usually turrets over the zones, bullets down the aisles and at entries.

Power and cabling (PoE) — the pain nobody specs

Placement isn't just the view. A camera has to be reachable, powered, and still on when the grid isn't.

• Ethernet/PoE range: ~100 m channel (≈90 m fixed cabling + 10 m patch, TIA-568 / IEEE 802.3). Plan to ~90 m, and note that high-draw cameras on thin or copper-clad-aluminium (CCA) cable can starve on voltage drop well before the length limit. Use solid-copper Cat5e/6, or add a switch closer.
• Budget the switch to peak, not idle. PoE classes: 802.3af ~15.4 W at the port (~12.95 W to the camera), 802.3at/PoE+ ~30 W (~25.5 W), 802.3bt/PoE++ up to ~90 W (~71 W). A fixed IP camera typically draws ~4–7 W, but adds several watts when night IR and heaters fire — so a switch sized to daytime idle fails at dusk when every IR ring lights up.
• Put the switch and router on a UPS. Indian floors don't get occasional short cuts — they get load-shedding and voltage sag that browns out cheap PoE injectors. The recorder is useless if the switch feeding the cameras is dead.

Field notes from a live floor

We run a working pilot on a metalworking and engine-repair shop — three 2 MP / 2.8 mm turret cameras, corner-mounted at the ceiling-wall junction (~2.4–2.6 m), wide angle, tilted in.

The placement decision that mattered most wasn't blind-spot count — it was one wall. The entry wall carries the door and a window onto the parking lot, and the main lathe sits directly under that window. Aim a corner camera back toward it and you get a black silhouette every sunny afternoon. So all three cameras went into corners looking inward, window behind or beside them, never into it. No amount of WDR would have saved a camera pointed the wrong way.

Over 14 days the floor logged exactly one mains outage — daytime, ~1h50m, zero at night, zero reboots. The recording laptop rode it out on its battery; the PoE switch, router, and all three cameras have no battery and dropped instantly. For those ~110 minutes the floor was dark on camera. Honest caveat: one outage in 14 days is indicative, not a base rate — but it's exactly why the UPS goes on the switch and router, not just the recorder.

Generating a placement plan without a site survey

Good placement is a read of the specific floor — where a pillar blocks a sightline, where material actually funnels single-file, which lamp will silhouette the aisle by 3 pm. That read is the whole job, and it's what Mama does from a phone walkthrough: film the floor once, and it returns where each camera goes, ceiling or wall, the coverage map, and the PoE/power budget — a draft plan an installer validates on site, not a replacement for the installer.

FAQ

How high should a camera be mounted on a factory floor? Overview cameras at working sightline height — ~2.5–4 m on a normal ceiling, or on columns/pendants in a high-bay shed — angled 15–30° down. Identification cameras go lower, ~2–2.5 m at a choke point, so faces fill the frame instead of scalps.

How many cameras do I need per square metre? None — square metres are the wrong unit. Place one camera per job (work zone, entry, hazard, identification point) and size it by pixels-on-target under the DORI standard. A camera-per-1,000-sq-ft ratio buys evenly-blurred footage that can't identify anyone.

What is the best camera placement to avoid glare from windows? Point the camera away from windows and open doors, with the bright opening behind or beside it. If you must shoot toward light, use WDR — but WDR drops framerate and blurs motion, so correct placement beats any setting.

How far can a PoE camera run from the switch? About 100 m over standard Ethernet (≈90 m of fixed cabling plus patch leads, TIA-568 / IEEE 802.3). Plan to ~90 m, and use solid-copper cable — thin or CCA cable causes voltage drop that starves the camera before the length limit.

Do I need a UPS for factory cameras? Yes — on the PoE switch and router, not just the recorder. Cameras and switches have no internal battery, so they die the instant mains drops. On an Indian floor with load-shedding, a small UPS on the switch keeps the whole floor recording through a cut.

Turret or bullet cameras for a shop floor? Turrets (ceiling/corner) for wide top-down coverage of work zones — their flat lens avoids the IR glare a dusty dome bubble causes. Bullets (wall) for long, narrow views down aisles and at entries, where their visibility also deters. Most floors use a mix.