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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
This is one cool gadget
By moonlighteye
Obtaining this TrendNet camera is my first foray into a home security camera and so far it has been pretty impressive -- it does a lot for the price. While I haven't had it for long, here are my initial thoughts:**PROS**-PoE. I went with PoE (TV-IP672PI) over WiFi because a) either way you will need a cable for power and b) if part of the purpose of the cam is for security, I'd rather have a cable over a WiFi signal "hanging out there" for some bored hacker to try and tap into, even if it is encrypted. Since I only have this one camera for now, I am using the TRENDnet Power Over Ethernet (PoE) Injector TPE-103I which is working out perfectly.-Night vision. The NV on this camera is working out really well and adequately covers a large living room + dining room. Keep in mind that when NV kicks in, the camera automatically switches over to black and white. When the IR LEDs are on, they will emit a dim red glow.-PTZ. Pan, Tilt, and Zoom. It's still fun to play with PTZ on this camera and you can do it from a web browser or your mobile TrendNet SecurView Pro app. The mobile apps are a bit different for Android vs. iPhone, but both allow you do pan and tilt (zoom seems to only work on the iPhone). Note that Internet Explorer seems a bit more friendly to operating the camera's web interface as compared to Chrome or Firefox. And yeah, when remotely viewing the cam with your mobile app the video is choppy and there's a delay when you pan or tilt, but that is not surprising.-Overall large viewing area. They call this a "megapixel" camera with 1280 x 800. Those of us familiar with marketing for camera phones and regular cameras know that more megapixels does not mean a higher quality image. While the image quality for this camera is pretty decent, it isn't superb, so what the megapixel bit means here is that you get a larger overall image for a given area. In addition to that, because the camera can pan and tilt, that just adds to the possible viewing area. Overall I find the image quality for both color and B&W modes to be perfectly acceptable.-Realistic color. Some low-end cameras that have built-in night vision don't have an IR cut filter or leave the IR LEDs on all the time, resulting in really bad color accuracy. For example, some cameras with NV will show green objects as greyish pink. This is not the case with this camera. When it's in color/day mode, colors are more or less what you expect.-2-way audio. This is a pretty fun feature. The camera has a built-in mic and you can hear audio from the area the camera is installed in from the mobile apps and via the web browser interface. I haven't tried hooking up external speakers yet though.-Onboard micro SD storage. If you add a micro SD card to the camera, you don't need to leave a PC on all the time and can still have local access to videos or snapshots recorded by the camera. I confirmed that this camera supports micro SD cards with up to 32GB of capacity.-Overall tons of features. I won't go into it all here, but I like how there's a lot of options. You can configure the camera to email you video or snapshots, you can turn off the fairly bright status LEDs, there's an external privacy button right on the camera to point it downward when you're home, etc. The more flexibility, the better (usually)!**CONS**-While the web configuration utility on the camera has been mostly frustration free, it seems there's a bug where the camera will stop sending video when certain options are saved and you have to reboot it to resume the video. I put in a help ticket with TrendNet to get feedback on that.-When the camera's NV mode is set to "Auto", its threshold for switching from daytime/color mode to firing up the IR LEDs seems too small. In other words it switches over to NV mode too easily (e.g., room gets darker with passing clouds) and as far as I know, you can't adjust the threshold. You can set the NV mode to "manual" but then you have to turn it on and off via the web utility (at least there's that).-If you want to configure DDNS (Dynamic DNS) on the camera itself, it seems you can only use DynDNS which is no longer a free service. DynDNS is not really expensive, but you should be able to put any DDNS provider you want in there; I have no idea why they would restrict that. Most modern home routers also have a DDNS option and hopefully have more DDNS provider options than this camera, so the workaround is to configure this on your router instead.**OTHER OBSERVATIONS**-This camera has a manual focus dial as opposed to an auto focus lens, which seems to be common as all the home security cameras with IR night vision that I researched had manual focus only. As mentioned previously, my camera is covering a fairly large room and all areas within the room have perfectly acceptable focus, therefore the lack of auto focus isn't an issue as far as I'm concerned.-If you want to use a gmail account to send you the email alerts, you'll need to configure the following settings on the camera: smtp[dot]gmail[dot]com for the SMTP Mail Server option, port 465, and SSL-TLS for the Use SSL-TLS option. Then, if your camera has a static IP address (recommended), you'll also need to fill out the Optional Primary DNS LAN setting on the camera, otherwise the camera can't resolve the SMTP server address to an IP address. You can get the Primary DNS IP address from the device settings option of your home router.-If you want to use the Synchronize with NTP Server option on the camera so you never have to worry about setting the time and date, you can use the IP address of your router (providing it has the NTP server option enabled -- most home routers should have this feature), or you can point the camera to a public NTP server such as pool[dot]ntp[dot]org. If you use the latter option or anything with a Fully Qualifed Domain Name (e.g., example[dot]timeserver[dot]com) you'll again need to ensure you have the Primary DNS field filled out. Again, if your camera is configured to get an IP address via DHCP (not recommended), you probably don't have to worry about this Primary DNS field.-You can "draw" motion areas with this camera, meaning you can configure the camera to only trigger recording when it senses motion within an area you define. Right now I'm not sure my camera is adhering to my pre-defined area too well, but I'm still working with that.-Aside from doing PTZ from the mobile apps, you can save snapshots to your phone, as well as send and receive audio.-If you manually set the time and date on the camera or copy it from your PC, the time and date will be lost when the camera reboots or is power cycled. Best to use NTP server option to avoid this.-Opened a help ticket with TrendNet support for a pre-sales question and got a response within 24 hours, which is promising for potential future issues.-When you mount the night vision version of the camera to the ceiling, note that it has a smiley face :)Overall I'm fairly pleased with this camera's performance and options. Hopefully it also proves to be durable and I'll update this review accordingly should there be any significant changes in my opinion. I would recommend this camera, especially if you only require just one, or maybe up to a few, indoor cameras.***Update 1 - December 6, 2012-I have now tested audio output from the camera. Connected a small, battery-powered speaker to the 3.5mm jack and used the microphone feature from my phone. There was a delay in sending audio from my phone of course, but it worked more or less as expected. Fooled the dogs, but not the wife.-The bug I mentioned where the camera stops sending video after applying certain changes to the camera via the web interface is not yet resolved. When this issue happens there will be no video output to any browser or via the mobile apps. It's not really a deal-breaking issue by any means, more of an annoyance, but still working with TrendNet tech support to figure it out.-While DynDNS no longer seems to offer free DDNS, no-ip[dot]com does. I'd check to make sure your router supports them though, because it's not an option on the camera itself.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Good camera
By John C. Gentle
This camera is very good - especially for the price. The only thing to be aware of is the lack of auto-focus. While this does not make the camera unusable, it does cause some issues if you pan around to an area that's focal point is of a different distance than other places in the pan. Just something to keep in mind when installing it - especially if your first view is blurry. Overall the camera is outstanding - and very durable. We dropped it from 20+ feet on to concrete, oops, and no damage what-so-ever!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Poor Quality control
By Dion T Brewington
Purchased two. First one worked great. Second one only worked through cabled lan. Wifi on it wouldn't see the router (same exact setup as one that works). Returned that one for replacement. The replacement had a motor problem out of the box. It would tilt properly but would not pan past a certain point and would just shudder/stall. Sent that one back for refund. I have kept the one that works and it works well and the software is nice. I have it so I can check via the android app. All little slow to respond to pan/tilt commands but acceptable. Typically takes about 4-5 seconds from the point you swipe to the point it actually moves but some of that could be the buffer. You aren't seeing LIVE video as there is a couple of seconds of buffer.
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Very good BUT...
