| Word | Description |
| C Mount | Long established industrial standard for connecting cameras and lenses, widely used in the CCTV industry. |
| C.C.I.R. (Comite Consultatif International des Radiocommunications) | The European TV standard 625 lines 50 fields. |
| Cable screen/shield | A conductor which forms a sheath around one or more insulated conductors. This reduces the effect of interference onto the conductors. This shield is usually metallic foil or stranded wire wrapped around the conductors. |
| Camera | Image capture device |
| CCD (Charged Coupled Device) | A 'chip' that performs the same function as a camera tube. |
| CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read-Only Memory) | A compact disk format used to hold text, graphics and hi-fi stereo in excess of 650 MB of data, which is equivalent to about 250,000 pages of text or 20,000 medium-resolution pages. |
| Chrominance (C) | The part of the video signal corresponding to the colour information. |
| Coax | An abbreviation for Coaxial Cable which is any cable that has a conductor and shield sharing the same axis. |
| Coaxial Cable | Any cable that has a conductor and shield sharing the same axis. |
| Composite Sync | A signal comprising of both Line and Field sync pulses but without any video information. |
| Composite Video | The full video signal, including both video data and sync pulses. |
| Compression | A number of methods to reduce the size of digital information. See J-PEG, M-PEG and Wavelets. |
| Conditional Refresh | Technique used in slow and fast scan where only small screen changes are transmitted. Up to a certain percentage of the on-screen picture can be updated before a full picture is required. |
| CS Mount (Special C mount) | New standard for connecting cameras and lenses. It has a shorter penetration into the camera, needed for many modern CCD designs. |
| CS to C Mount Adaptor (C Ring) | 5mm spacer ring used to enable the use of C mount lenses on CS mount cameras. |
| CVBS | Composite Video, Blanking, and Sync (CVBS) is an analog video (picture only) signal before it is combined with a sound signal. |