Customer Reviews

Cisco PVC2300 Business Internet Security Video Camera w/Audio

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Excellent camera, very easy to setup and works great. I have (2) more of the PVC2300, and (1) WVC2300 wireless camera and all work fine with no issues. I have a Linksys/Cisco RV082 Router and configured port forwarding to access from the internet. If you have DHCP with your ISP, you will need to setup dynamic DNS with a provider in order to view the camera over the internet. I use DynDNS and it works fine. The 2-way sound work fine, but the volume is a bit loud when it forst comes on. You will need to tweak it to the volume you prefer.

 

I posted a poor review before, however after playing with my product I found out a technical issue, and my product works great. I am please with my purchase.

We had tried several others before finding the Logitech. We put in 13 of them and bought the 'advanced' software from cisco. So far all are working reliably and we have replaced our troublesome ADT alarm system with motion triggers and a few sensors. The recording and email alerts have functioned flawlessly. We downloaded some software from our android phones that lets us see the streams live.

I bought some mounts for our drop ceiling but ended up just switching to wall mounts and replacing a few of the lenses with some wider angel lenses from the traditional system we had before.

The ability to add external speaker and mic was important but we ended up interfacing with our phone system instead because of the difficulty of getting an IP door box to work with the cam software.

If you want a SHARP feature rich camera, this works well and reliably. It is significantly bigger than the very little cams it replaces and we had to run Network wire and have POE for it.

We put all the cams and server on their own switch to reduce network but it is already compressed at the cam so 10 cams dosn't use 1% of our 1GB switch. We have 4 or 5 people viewing all cams at all times.

Dinged one star as we had to buy the 'advanced' software and because they are a bit large. However they are very noticeable. have a red light, and may act as a deterrent.

Consider purchasing an IR illumination if your lights are out at night.

Purchased 6 from Amazon

 

I was extremely excited about this product when I saw it. It has the Cisco name, PoE, HTTP and RTSP protocols built in.

Initially, I thought it was a perfect fit for my needs. I need to webcast something to a viewing audience around the globe, not a lot of people, but enough that I needed RTSP capability.

This camera would not broadcast outside the router firewall. It worked fine inside the private network, streaming to Windows Media and RealPlayer.

But when we opened up the firewall ports for outside viewing, NOTHING. The players could connect to the camera fine (login authentication was requested) but the video would simply not stream.

I contacted Cisco, and they told me it was my router set up and they couldn't do anything about it. I read things, went on message boards, etc. Nothing about this particular camera was helpful.

I called Cisco back and demanded they look into it. I told them that we weren't dummies, that we knew how to open up ports on the firewall (we got the HTTP stream just fine).

Turns out, their engineering staff couldn't get it to work either!

On top of that, it turned out that their activeX certificate built into the firmware was expired. Expired! You couldn't load their HTTP viewer activeX control without disabling the warning in IE. The workaround they gave me was to download the activeX to the PC directly, then it would work OK. That's fine if you only have one user, but the idea is that anyone with the login could connect to the camera and, viola! The activeX loads and installs and everyone is happy.

The hardware itself seems robust, and the PoE feature worked fine. The viewing angle was a little narrower than I would have liked, but since it had the ability to change lenses, I was okay with that.

I have returned this camera back to Amazon, and I have ordered the D-Link camera instead. Hopefully, that works better.

At this price point, you are better off with something else.