Toshiba Network Camera

I was thinking of adding a network (IP) camera to my home network for a while. First idea was to have it wireless (WiFi) connected. But as I wanted to have an outside look at my house and garden, WiFi was not solving anything - I still needed a wire for power supply. After a quick browse through various on-line shops and auction sites, I soon realized the task to pick a really good one was not that trivial.

There are hundreds of USB web-cams on the market, but for me USB was not the option. The original idea was to be able to run the camera without any PC and to be able to view the video stream from any PC. Thus it had to be a standalone, network - connected camera. Then there are a few (Linksys, Dlink) vendors offering fairly inexpensive network cameras. Unfortunately when I dived deeper into the specs of these cams, I soon found out the output picture was not going to be what I wanted. The low end cams offer QVGA (320x240) resolution (comparable to a resolution of a mobile phone display), and there is a higher class of products offering VGA (640x480). But still VGA is roughly a quarter of a typical computer display, so the level of details is not really high. I explored one model (Linksys) a little further, mainly via the comments people leave on the Amazon.com, and learned there was nothing to expect but problems - rather typical problems with many recent Linksys products like complicated setup (that I could live with) and stability problems (something to stay as far from as possible). The last thing I wanted is my "home video surveillance system" to freeze twice a day and require a reboot.

BTW the Amazon.com user reviews section, available for almost any home electronics product you can imagine is a great service. Kudos to people who find their time and take the effort to post the reviews. It really becomes my rule of thumb to go to the Amazon website and check for reviews before I buy anything. Unfortunately Amazon refuses to ship electronics down to Poland, so I just use the service to read the comments and keep buying elsewhere - something to reconsider, Jeff, especially as you can still send books and CDs down here without problems...

But coming back to the webcam business - I finally locked my focus on the Toshiba IK-WB15A. The specs were good (1280x960, motorized pan/tilt/zoom, outdoor mount included). The price was high. Something around $600. Finally I decided to go for it and do not regret it at all. Actually this has been my best buy for a long time. Everything, from picture quality to build quality to feature set has exceeded my expectations. I bundled the camera with a POE (Power Over Ethernet) power supply, so there is just a single Ethernet cable going to it - elegant and reliable. The camera has hundreds of features. Just to give you an example: it can stream video down to two redundant FTP servers and maintain a cyclical buffer on own SD card. Or can detect a motion and send you an email with picture attached. Actually the only thing I am missing is to send an email TO the camera and get back a reply with picture attached - that would enable an easy method of viewing the pictures on demand from my smartphone (a smartphone cannot log in directly to the camera, as it does not handle ActiveX controls, while they are the only way to view a live stream).

But the above are just minor feature requests, overall I am very satisfied with the product!