 Great webcam |
| Review Date: October 11, 2009 |
| Reviewer: A. Levin, Park City, Ut. United States |
| Finally one that works. The web cam was extremely easy to setup and it worked well. The video is excellent and the accompanying software is good. I tried another web cam by Linksys and compared to this it was junk. I sent it back. Only difficulty so far is getting the email notification to work. Support is excellent. I would recommend you sign up for free DDNS with [...]. Overall I would definitely recommend this product. |
Absolutely Awesome!!!
|
| Review Date: December 5, 2009 |
| Reviewer: M. Grant, San Diego, CA |
This little thing has saved us many a sleepless night. My wife had purchased a small dedicated baby monitor for use in the nursery, and you could barely see anything with it. This thing provides a very sharp display.
I'd been shopping for one of these for some time. I finally decided on this model because for the most part, those who have any knowledge of computers thought it was great. Those that don't have a good understanding of computers and how to set up IP's and get into the routers should probably get a wired camera.
Pros: Low light works great. Daylight has some color issues, but I didn't get it to take 10mp pictures to develop. while the colors may not be great, the contrast and sharpness is definitely there. We haven't tried to use the speaker that hooks up to the camera, maybe when our little one is older and we move this by the front door! The provided software works as advertised, not great but not horrible. I've used it create audible alerts based on motion detection and I've recorded my child's movements throughout the night, saving to a NAS.
Cons: it wasn't cheaper. I would like it to have a larger range of focus. It has frozen up on me twice. The unit gets pretty warm. Sound tends to lag picture.
Thoughts: if you want a monitor that will give you a crisp view of what's going on with your kid, and you want to be able to record it and view it from any computer in the house, then this is for you!
Enjoy. |
Does lots of stuff, hard to set up
|
| Review Date: January 9, 2008 |
| Reviewer: M. Strahan, Florida |
I bought this camera for my sister, who just had a new baby. I wanted a wireless web came with two way audio, so that she could take it from room to room. I couldn't find a simple wireless webcam, so I bought this thing, which does way more than I wanted. Luckily, I like gadgets, and this is one neat gadget. However, its very difficult to setup if you want to use some of its advanced capabilities. Since the manual does not give very good instructions, I'll try to describe the basic things you need to do to set it up, as well as provide an overview of what it does. Do not buy this camera if you are not comfortable configuring your router. Someone who doesn't have basic networking skills would probably give this camera one star.
Pros
1) Can be an excellent security camera. The motion detection software works well, and the IR night vision is very good. The two way audio over the internet means you can speak to people it sees. It can be setup to send an email to your cell phone, and then you can log onto it with a PC and view and speak to your intruders or guests. It can also record video clips to network storage, although I couldn't get it to mount a shared windows directory. It seems to want a linux based shared drive.
2) The video quality is good, although not what you would call high quality. It's a little bit jerky, but that's what you get with this technology.
3) Has a nice mounting bracket that you can screw to a wall. The bracket has a tilt swivel mount on it like a camera tripod mount, so you can easily attach/detach the camera from the mount. This means you can carry it from room to room when using as a webcam, then put it back on the wall mount to use it as a security camera.
4) The included software can view multiple cameras at the same time, with each camera being displayed in a tile, just like a professional security camera system.
Cons
1) Horrible setup. If you don't know how to configure your wireless router, you won't be able to view this camera over the Internet. See below. However, if you only want to view it from a PC on your local network, and don't need the email notices when it detects motion, you can set this thing up just fine. This means you can't use it as a webcam, though. The instructions do not tell you anything about configuring your router to do this.
2) No autofocus. How do you focus a wireless camera that is in a different room than the computer monitor you use for viewing the camera? You can't, because you can't turn the manual focus ring and see the results as you turn it. This makes for a lot of back and forth to get the thing focused. The solution is to bring your wireless laptop with you as you move the camera.
3) Won't mount a windows shared directory. Technical support has yet to answer my email about this. Basically, this means you can't have it automatically record video clips to your PC when it detects motion. You can still record video clips manually, through the software interface, though, even onto a PC over the Internet.
4) No tilt/pan. Some cameras in this price range come with tilt/pan. I sacrificed it to get the two way audio and the IR night vision. The field of view is pretty wide, so I don't really miss the tilt/pan.
Setup tips
Most people's wireless router will have a dynamic IP address assigned to it by your Internet provider. Computers and cameras on your wireless network will have private IP addresses that are not routable to the Internet. By default, this camera wants to use 192.168.10.30 as its IP address. Your router may not recognize this private address. Mine was setup to only use a 192.168.1.x network. I had to reconfigure the router's private network to the 192.168.10.x network to talk to the camera.
Furthermore, there is no way to view the camera on that private network from a PC over the Internet. However, you can configure your router to route incoming requests from the Internet to the camera. You have to set up ports 80 and 554 to be redirected to the camera's private IP. Next, you have to be able to find your routers external dynamic IP address from a web browser on an Internet PC. The only way to do that is to sign up for a dynamic DNS service. When your router gets its IP assignment, it will report it to the dynamic DNS service, who will map it to a URL that you will type in your browser. Once set up, you view your camera over the Internet by typing in your URL. The dynamic DNS service sends your browser to your router's IP address, then your router redirects the request to the internal private IP address of the camera. A similar redirect would be needed if you were running a hardware firewall on your network. Note, the camera does have the ability to report its IP address to a dynamic DNS service, too. Only use this if the camera's IP address is actually routable over the Internet. Most of us will have the camera on a private network, with an IP address that is not routable. In this cae, if you use the dynamic DNS from the camera, instead of your router, it will not work.
If you want to setup email from the camera, you need to be able to configure it to talk to your provider's SMTP server. It's very similar to setting up an email client, so if you can do that, you can do this. It can send email and record pics/vid without you having to setup that dynamic DNS, thankfully. You only need the dynamic DNS if you want to view it over the internet.
|
Great Night mode. Poor Day Mode. Not so hard to setup. Frustrating Limitations.
|
| Review Date: June 4, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Jace E. Mouse, |
You can't find a better device at this price point, but it does come with some annoyances and limitations.
Things I Like:
- Really great night mode via built-in infrared lights.
- Stable. No crashes or hiccups in the month I've had it.
- Solid construction. The camera and included mounting bracket are very sturdy.
- MPEG streaming video. Really nice quality, and a fraction of the bandwidth required by MJPEG standards, so there's less "internet lag."
- The ability to backup your settings is a nice touch, in case you have to reset the camera for any reason.
- Three year warranty.
- Support for sound. Built-in ability to listen (from IE, not from Firefox/Java) and the ablilty to connect speakers to "talk through" the camera.
This I Dislike:
- Camera gets "stuck" in night mode. Under normal indoor lights, the camera often continues to force itself into night mode, which results in strange washed-out colors. This is made more frustrating by software limitations that don't allow you to manually control which mode the camera operates in. Seems to work okay in fluorescent lights from office settings. Surely, this is all just a software glitch that will be fixed in an eventual software patch....I hope.
- Always requires a username and password to view the camera. So if you want to just setup a public camera, that's a frustrating limitation.
- Difficult to remove Trendnet's "branding" around their live video images - their logo, border, and other stuff. I think this can be done, but it's certainly going to require web developer skills and a bit of hacking to do it.
Other things you'll want to know:
- Focusing the camera is done via the focus ring on the front of the housing, not from within the software. So you have to be physically present at the camera to do it. That means you'll also need your laptop (or a friend on a phone) to know you're getting it right.
- TrendNet's site includes a "lobby cam" from their office, as well as a simulated user interface, and digital version of the manuals. That gives you a pretty good feel for what you're going to get with the camera.
- Viewing this camera from outside your home network is going to require some advanced skills in updating your router's settings. It's not especially hard, and there are instructions online to do it. But unless your router supports these settings and you're willing to tinker with them, many of the camera's features are going to be unavailable to you.
- The setup was not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, based on other reviews. The need to connect it via a network cable to do the initial setup is a little annoying, but understandable and not too difficult if you've read through the manual. The manual is actually pretty well-written - you can download it from the manufacturer's site to judge for yourself.
|
For the Price, it's a decent IP camera with night day/night vision
|
| Review Date: August 21, 2008 |
| Reviewer: MJC, Chicago |
I'd really give this camera 3.5 stars. If setup were easier, it would be a solid 4, if it didn't have manual focus 4.5, if all of above were true and the company's manual or website gave decent support, it would be 5 stars because of the low costs but high features.
My Trendnet IP312W is connected to a Mac (OS X Leopard) airport express network used for home and baby monitoring. Mac support from Trendnet's site and manual for this product is woefully low.
I am using it with Evocam software, which provided moral support during the various evenings I spent getting it to work. (Eventually selecting "use RTSP" for this camera in Evocam brought an image from the camera, that was after I changed the camera's default IP address, etc).
The camera provides a decent picture day and night via our local network. The image is browser accessible via the local network with most browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE).
The price on this camera was significantly lower than many other wireless cameras capable of joining a more secure WPA2 wireless network and also providing night vision. Word to the wise, you can't buy some other color network camera and a standalone infrared light from Amazon and expect to make your own, budget, night vision system. |
|
No video reviews found for this product.
