Customer Reviews
Takes a chill'n and keeps on film'n
Though billed as an indoor camera rated down to 32 degrees, I took a chance and mounted it outside my interior Alaska home.
Under the eave of my roof, out of direct exposure to precipitation, it has nonetheless been fully exposed to the temperature extremes of this climate. It has continued to work fine -- panning and all -- despite temperatures that have ranged from 40 below zero to 90 above. 1.5 winters and one summer and still counting.
Will this kill it eventually? Maybe so, but I can tell you it is one tough little camera and doesn't give up easily.
I won't go on to repeat what all the other reviewers here have been saying about this camera (negative and positive), as I have found most of it to be true.
I would give this camera five stars except for one complaint: It doesn't support WPA security. It supports up to 128 bit WEP, which meant I had to downgrade my network from WPA to WEP to integrate it. And, Panasonic has not responded to any emails I have sent asking if WPA might be in a future firmware upgrade. But I would still not hesitate to recommend this network camera to anybody.
Great camera for the price
Pros:
1. Easy setup - I know others had some difficulty getting the camera up and going, but the quick start guide worked perfectly for me. I had the camera up and on the net in about 45 minutes. I'm using a cable modem connection and a Linksys G router. I didn't have to change any router settings, just made sure the SSID and WEP key were correct.
2. Image Quality - Better than I expected for a camera at this price point. Very good in good lighting, so-so in low light.
3. Features - I like the ability to pan and tilt. It responds quickly.I also like being able to re-center the image by clicking in the frame. The [...]address is very nice, and was easy to configure. Setup of users and passwords was a snap. I also like the presets for quick navigation to different points in the room.
4. Styling - Not bad. It's small and light. Easy to move around if you don't want to mount it. It looks kinda col.
5. Email and FTP - Nice to have.
Cons:
1. No audio - Not that important to me, but would be nice.
2. No zoom - Wouldn't expect this at this price point.
3. No motion detection - I haven't tried the heat detection, but would guess that motion detection would work better. But then again, I should test it out.
Overall, I am very pleased. I bought this from Amazon's warehouse direct as an open box item, and saved some cash. It works great for home use.
Panasonic Has Great Developer Access
First of all, I didn't find this camera very difficult to setup. It's important that you understand wireless networking somewhat before getting any product like this. Also, to get to the webcam from outside of your firewall (or router), you must forward port 80 which may be a pain if you already have a web server running.
I bought this camera specifically because it has timed FTP transfer. I needed a solution that could handle a lot of users and since live video on a home network to thousands of users is NOT feasible with a simple plug-and-play solution like this, I was hopeful of uploading an image every second or so. This proved to be slower than I thought. First of all, you can only select buffering (snapshot) time intervals of 1 sec, 1 min, or 1 hour. This is not much of a choice. Second, the 1 second mode is too slow. It can't FTP out the images fast enough to make it even close to what I wanted. The images come about 15 to 30 seconds delayed and the system for doing this is so-so. I found that the system operated perfectly at 1 minute, so if this is all you need than the FTP option is right for you.
I was really frustrated at this point until I discovered the CGI documentation for this line of cameras. I haven't seen anyone else comment on this so I wanted to for all of the developers out there. Panasonic thought ahead when developing this product and made it such that you can issue CGI commands via HTTP1.0 (or 1.1) to make the camera do things or to acquire images. For my system this proved to be an absolutely perfect answer to my problem. I can call the camera with HTTP1.1, HTTP authentication, and a custom CGI and acquire the image on the screen at rates of 1 image per second with great results! There is no problem with the camera lagging at all. Best of all, almost everything you can do in the camera's admin panel can be done via CGI calls.
I also found that this camera does a decent job at night (using it to look outside), but as others have said is not good if you want to make out a ton of detail in someone's face for instance. The camera is also doing great being exposed to temperatures of 20 degrees F (in a garage) and hasn't froze or needed to be reset since I installed it a few weeks ago. The wireless range is really good... I am running the cam across the street to my wireless network with no problems.
For awesome customization and access via CGI, I'm giving this camera 5 big stars. This camera is a developer's best friend and for the price it is a huge value. Thanks Panasonic for solving some big problems for me!
