This is the easiest way I found to monitor our home remotely.
I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly everything came together - I had the camera installed and transmitting in less than 15 minutes. I plugged the camera into a power outlet, popped the CD in (on a Windows 7 64-bit computer), entered my wireless network credentials, set up a DLink account from which to monitor the camera, and presto!
What works well:
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1. The lens is reasonably wide angle - it can cover most of a normal size room.
2. It has audio! And it works very well.
3. Image quality is decent - you can recognize people, but it isn't broadcast quality by any means.
4. Moving the camera kills the feed for a couple of minutes, but it's back on the network in less than 2 minutes.
5. The iPhone app is cool! We were able to watch the camera just as well on an iPod Touch. As another reviewer suggested, Tiny Cam (the free version is sufficient) worked great for me on Android.
6. The admin interface for the camera is stellar. You can control the refresh rate and resolution of the camera; the saturation, brightness, and contrast of the image; and the volume for the audio. You can even turn off the annoying LED light on the front of the unit!
7. Setting up motion detection is also really easy. You just pick the sensitivity of detection, and click on parts of the frame where you want detection to trigger. That's it! When motion is detected, you can ask the camera to email you the images.
8. Setting up email notification is simple too. I looked up the SMTP address and port for Yahoo, entered my email address and password, and was soon receiving emails from my camera!
9. This device supports WPS. What this means that you can automatically configure it to access your router, with just a couple of button presses. You press the WPS button on this camera, and within 60 seconds press the WPS button on your router (or in your router's admin screen). Then, magically, within about a minute, your camera configures itself with the SSID and password required to connect to your router.
10. It connects via Wireless-N and has an awesome range. It connects without problems to my router from across the house, through multiple walls.
What doesn't:
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1. The camera does not work in low light conditions as it does not have infrared capabilities. You need at least a 40W lamp for it to be functional. This tends to be a bit annoying for me, as the camera becomes fairly useless once evening falls. The infrared-capable DCS-932L may be a better choice in this regard.
2. No pan/tilt options on this camera. For me, this is not as big a deal as the low light issue, especially given its wide angle of view.
3. The camera feels a bit delicate, but should hold up well given that it isn't going to be handled much. It did take a couple of falls and has survived.
4. The camera needs to be plugged into an electrical outlet. Its short power cord does limit the locations where it can be placed.
Conclusions:
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Overall, this was plug and play installation at its best.
I also can't believe there is a simpler way to get all of this functionality in a single unit. This device is extensively customizable. I was particularly impressed that the designers had thought about putting in a way to turn off the blinking LED in the front of the camera. This LED is a very useful diagnostic tool (it flashes amber when it is setting itself up, and green when it is broadcasting), but it drove me nuts, until I found this option in the admin panel.
Updated Feb 06 2011:
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Okay maybe I spoke too soon.
Access to the camera that I tested when I wrote this review was from within my internal network. Unfortunately, the feed from this camera was not visible from outside my home network. My router and this camera were UPnP compatible but that didn't seem to help.
Networking Primer:
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Before you begin, remember that you only have one publicly visible IP address - and this is allocated by your ISP, and is assigned to your router. Inside your network, your devices are allocated private IP addresses, in the range 192.168.x.y. These addresses are termed "private" because they only make sense within your own internal private network.
A computer outside your network only recognizes the public IP address of your router. It has no idea how many devices you might have on your internal network.
The workaround below, lets you use the mechanism of [port forwarding] to uniquely identify one of your internal devices, and make it addressable over the Internet. You do this by reserving a particular port (say, 81), and telling your router that any attempt to access that particular port on the public IP address, should actually be sent directly on to the internal device (say, a camera) identified by a given private address (say, 192.168.1.5).
You have roughly up to 65535 ports that you can forward, though many of these ports are reserved for well known applications (such as a web browser on port 80). Ports between 49152 and 65535 are considered private and usable for reasons such as this one.
For each camera you want to expose externally, you'll need to pick a port number, and then add a port forwarding rule to your router.
The workaround:
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1. Log in to your camera's settings page:
...a. on the Network Setup tab > set Port Settings to listen for HTTP requests on port 81.
...b. Disable UPnP
2. On your router
...a. Turn off UPnP
...b. Add a new Port Forwarding Rule
.....Service Name: DCS930L.
.....Protocol: TCP/UDP.
.....Starting/Ending Ports: 81.
.....Server IP Address: set this to the internal network address for your camera.
.....This will be of the form 192.168.x.y, where x usually is 0 or 1, and y will vary.
A port forwarding rule causes any request coming to your router's IP address at this port to be forwarded to the server IP address that you specify.
3. Now access the camera using your static IP address as assigned by your provider @ port 81.
...This will take the form: [...]. Note this is your externally visible IP address (not of the form 192.168.x.y)
...Provide login credentials.
If you want to get really fancy, and are tired of keeping up with changing IP addresses, then you might wish to register at dyndns.org. My router
Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router WNDR3700 actually keeps dyndns informed whenever my ISP changes my IP address. You can then use a simple textual host name and it will be automatically converted to your IP address - whatever it may be set to currently.
Hope this helps.
Happy Monitoring!
~Damodar