Customer Reviews

D-Link DCS-900 10/100TX Home Security Internet Camera

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I bought this camera as a means to check my house while I am gone on vacation. I never heard of internet cameras before until recently while looking at PC catalogs. I ended up buying the DCS-900 because of the price and the good reviews I read here in Amazon.com. Let me tell what my experience has been so far.

Getting the camera setup on your local LAN is fairly straightforward. As long as you know the IP address of your router and how to do simple network configuration for the camera, you should be up and running in 10 minutes.

On the otherhand, configuring the camera for access from the web took me 2 days of searching for info on the Internet, emails to D-Link technical support, firmware upgrade for my router and constant rereading of the manuals and the D-Link Knowledge Base. Listen carefully because here's what they don't tell you about the product beforehand if you want access your camera from the web.

1) Camera's default port is 80. If you have Cable or DSL broadband, most ISPs do not allow access to port 80 to discourage their customers from setting up webservers on their network. You have to set the camera to some other port like 800 or so.

2) You must be comfortable with setting up your router and understand how port forwarding and virtual server table works. If you have a firewall, then you must make more configuration changes. Make sure you access to your broadband router and you feel comfortable making these changes. D-Link documentation only reference their own routers as examples.

3) If your broadband connection has Dynamic IP addressing which most cable and DSL subscribers do, you have to set up a Dynamic DNS account with services like DynDNS.org or TZO.com. There, you create a DNS address (i.e. - www.myname.com) that will map to the dynamic address of your broadband connection. The software on camera will perform updates to the Dynamic DNS for you if your IP address changes.

4) You will also need a static web service account for the ActiveX Xplug Control software to be located when accessing the camera. Essentially this is a place where you can host webpages onto for access from the Internet. My geocities.com account prevents me from uploading the xplug.ocx file onto the server w/o an upgrade to a premium account at this time.

5) Make sure your router has the latest firmware to support virtual servers. This was the last step that prevented me from making the camera visible on the net.

Soooo....after all these steps, I was very successful in getting my camera up and running just the way I want it. I think this is a great product and I highly recommend it. You do have to have a little bit of network experience to comfortably configure everything.

I can not give it the full five stars because I think the documentation was fairly lacking when it comes to describing what you need to do to set the camera up for Internet access. As a matter of fact, even the description for the camera setup itself was somewhat vague and very terse. However, once you get pass all that, I am happy to say that it all works well!!

Pros
Built in webserver
Reliable
Good Value
Good quality in good lighting

Cons
Hard to configure for novice users (was easy for me)
Heavy on system resources when recording video to hard drive
Picture quality is every grainy in low light

first off, when I received the unit I thought it was rather big compared to the images on the websites. I wanted to share this advice for those people that does not know how to get this thing started. The original ip address of the unit is 192.168.0.20, which means if you have a home network set at 192.168.1.xxx or 192.168.2.xxx, etc. It will not be able to recognize the camera because it is in a different subnet. So you will have to set your laptop/desktop's ip address to that range between 192.168.0.1 through 192.168.0.254 except 192.168.0.20 (since that belongs to the dcs-900). once you launch the crappy wizard software it will recognize the camera's ip address so you can configure it to your home network address.

I hope this helped a lot of you. :) It only took me 2 minutes to configure this thing.

I wanted to monitor a construction project in my apartment courtyard, but could not take time off from work. I decided to hook up a Internet camera to my cable modem so I could watch the progress from my desk. After some research I wound up buying the D-Link DCS-900. It was by far the least expensive camera, but it suited my purpose.

I set it up in a window overlooking the project and I was able to watch the workers rebuild the flagstone courtyard. On several occasions, I saw mistakes and was able to call the contractor on his cell phone. I know the project would not have turned out as well as it did if I didn't have this camera.

As others have pointed out, the photo quality is grainy and it will only work in well-lit areas, but if you don't want to empty your wallet, this is a great camera for the price.

I have three D-Link cameras - two DCS-900W and one DCS-950. All three required firmware updates, all three came with obsolete viewing software, two have had to go back for repairs (one 900W and one 950) --- and they're giving me problems again. Unfortunately, they're 200 miles from here, and I can't easily get to them, so reliability is an issue with me.
Then there's the documentation issue. There's no hint of the fact that the latest version of their multi-view software (which lets you look at up to four cameras at the same time) doesn't work with anything under Windows XP, or that the only browser that works with the 950 is Internet Explorer. Local setup on a network is fairly easy, but going through a firewall creates problems, the least of which is that it is difficult to test from inside the network. The documentation mentions three ports that need changing, but doesn't explain much about what they do (and the 950 has a fourth port that the documentation doesn't even mention).
The DCS-900 descriptions mention motion sensing, but they don't tell you that this function has to be implemented remotely - that is, the camera is set up to stream continuous video to a remote computer, and it is the computer that then monitors for motion and records it when detected.
As to video quality - the 950 is fairly decent, but the 900 is much worse. The 950 has a mike for audio, and it works fairly well from inside the firewall, but I still haven't figured out how to access it from outside. And the FAQ on DLink's web site contradicts their manual.
I like the fact that D-Link supplies a program to view multiple cameras at the same time, but not all D-Link cameras work with the same program version, so you can't mix other models or brands. (The D-Link web site has a later version that supports both the 900 and 950 models, but this one has some installation problems and run-time errors.)
My overall impression - D-Link rushed this out the door and it shows.

3.5 lux camera not good enough for night ops and the instructions for router setup are for D-Link routers!!
I have a linksys router and finally got it working. Make sure you do the PORT FORWARDING of 80 and 8421 to the camera's 192.168.1.2x address. On the camera, make sure the gateway is the router's address of 192.168.1.1. If you are using a firewall like zonealarm, make sure that external address is in the TRUSTED ZONE list.
The user interface is slooow and sometimes buggy! For example, the camera will hang if I change IP addresses on it. You'd have to run the setup wizard again.

The DCS-900 is a cost effective network camera accompanied by a bad manual and backed up by friendly tech support people with tunnel vision.

We have 3 cameras and decided to put one of them on the Internet. Well to do that D-Link offers and ActiveX and a JAVA solution. We tried to tell them the JAVA solution was too slow for motion. Their Answer... Our network makes the camera slow. The fact the ActiveX solution is fast was ignored.

See a camera in operation at http://tclark.com/SecurityCam.asp and review the ActiveX and JAVA solution for yourself.

I was looking for inexpensive IP cameras to be used in video surveillance for our company. The fist cam I bought is the TV-IP100 by TrendNet. The second cam was the DCS-900.

The first thing I noticed was that the lens piece, mounting bracket, power supply, and even the backlabel looked awfully similar. The browser-based configuration is also nearly identical, with one notable exception: the DCS-900 lacks the "Anti-flicker" option, which caused significant image detirioration in certain places inside the office (dark waves would slowly travel up the image).

I liked the DCS-900's form factor better, so I decided to take the risk, and flash the DCS-900 with IP100's firmware. Surprisingly, it worked! So now the DCS-900 seems to think that it's actually an IP100, and it has the "anti-flicker" option.

The image quality of both cameras is nearly identical, the image is very noisy in a dark (or low-light) environment, to the point where it trips the motion sensor even at the lowest (least sensitive) setting. When used in a well-lit environment, the image quality is very good.

The cameras will be used with Linux-based video recording software (Zoneminder).

Vitaliy

I've been using a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 USB webcam attached to my home computer to serve video through my Linksys router over the internet using free tools from Winamp/Shoutcast/NSV. I get 15 fps, at 320x240, with fair video quality, including 32kbps sound, at a total data rate of about 10KBps. That's one fifth of my Comcast-dictated cable upstream speed limit. A very impressive solution, except it requires I leave my computer on all the time, and that I have the camera near the computer.

The DCS-900 can send the same number of 320x240 frames over an ethernet cable, but at the (pretty high) data rate of 115 KBps, and that doesn't include any sound! Yes, the frames look a little better, but more than ten times better? No. The tiny processor in the camera doesn't compress video well at all, at least compared to the NSV solution.

So beware if you want to serve video upstream and out your cable modem. Most cable providers limit upstream speed to 50KBps. This little camera will choke your modem at full-motion speeds. I've reduced my outgoing frame rate to 1fps so I don't choke my modem. A bit of a drag, but now I can shut off my computer when I'm not home.

If you have a higher upstream speed limit, or you are using this camera only within a LAN, I highly recommend it. For lan use, the IPView SE software included is really excellent, allowing video capture, motion detection, etc.

Also provided was some D-ViewCam software, which seemed half-baked and didn't work at all on my system. Stick with the IPView SE.

Another big plus with the DCS-900 is the mounting hardware. Very sturdy, steel stuff. It works just as well as a table stand as it would work screwed into a wall. As well, the camera can be easily mounted on a standard tripod! Nice.

The camera is good for providing still shots over the internet, or video over a LAN through IPView SE.

I have two of these and they have been working great for about 2 months. Getting them setup is a little goofy (I think D-Link should default to DHCP not some hard-coded address). You cannot beat the price/performance of these guys.

The IPView software that is provided really kicks these things up a level. I am able to have my screen split into 4 parts to show up to 4 cameras at once. You can also access each camera via a web browser (passwd protection, java or active-x, ability to ftp images, etc)

I HIGHLY reccomend these cameras. I have used Axis products in the past - and yes the image on the Axis is better - but the price was 20 times higher also.