No matter how good or expensive a camera may be, it is useless without the proper lens. For most applications, a fixed-focus lens is adequate. Fixed focus lenses have fixed field of view and are the cheapest in the family of lenses. Commonly used focal lens vary from 4.0 mm (wide angle) to 1000 mm (tele-photo) The 4.0 mm lens has a wide horizontal view. Long focal length lenses are generally used outdoors, viewing remote areas, and usually are quite large and require very stable mounts (or pan-tilt drives) to obtain good quality pictures.

The zoom lenses are used particularly in remote monitoring applications, mostly with pan-tilt where the Field of view (FOV) seen by the lens and camera must be varied from wide angle to narrow angle and vice versa. The zoom lens permits viewing narrow, medium and wide angle scenes depending on its setting thereby permitting initial wide field viewing of an area and then close-in tele-photo viewing of one portion of the area. These lenses are available for either manual or motorized operation.

Pin Hole cameras do not use a lens and normally their quality off picture is inferior as compared to lens based camera but still of acceptable quality for most of usual applications.