Quality Camera But Can Only Be Viewed On Windows Machines

I bought this camera to use as a high tech baby monitor. Being able to monitor our newborn on our laptops anywhere in the house was a big plus. The camera transmits over 802.11 and can be configured for the B or G variation. In our case, I was looking for a camera that could be secured with WPA, and this model can do WPA or WEP.

Setup is very easy, and I love the LCD readout on the camera's base that tells you what its current IP address is. That was very smart of Linksys. It makes finding the camera on your network a piece of cake.

Additionally, guest viewers can access the camera over the internet if you are technically savvy enough to open up the correct ports in your firewall or router. The camera has a built in web server, so users connect directly to it with Internet Explorer - no additional web server or hardware is necessary. The image is displayed via an ActiveX control which the end user will be prompted to install.

The camera comes with a client which can be configured to monitor more than one of these cameras should you choose to purchase additional units.

The unit can be remotely controlled, moved left or right, up and down. These features can be locked out for guest viewers, so as an administrator, you can fix the camera on one object and not worry about guest viewers panning the camera around the room.

Video quality is decent and is about what I've come to expect from most webcams. There are a couple codecs you can set from within the camera's control panel that allow you to experiment a little with your bandwidth environment. My primary complaint as far as quality goes, is that the audio is about two seconds out of sync with the video. Amazingly, the video is near realtime. Attempting to use this device as a video conferencing tool was incredibly painful.

Linksys advertises the ability to zoom in and out, but this is a digital zoom, which in my opinion is only a special effect and pretty worthless. An optical zoom would have been nice.

Another image quality issue may annoy some, but I found it to be very useful. Sometimes the image can begin to look like it is washed out, or the colors can become tinged with blue or purple overtones. I believe this is because the camera did not ship with an infrared filter. However, because of that, I can turn on an IR lamp (used for night time video photography) and the image will appear on my laptop as if the lights are on in the room. In fact, it is pitch black! This way my newborn son can sleep undisturbed from any light source in the room, but I can still see him on the laptop. As a new dad, this soothed my paranoid fears about him rolling over and blocking his airway from smooshing his face into his mattress.

If you have a video camera with the "Nightshot" feature, you can use your video camera as the infrared light instead of purchasing a dedicated lamp. I have two Sony video cameras with this feature, and they both may be used as an infrared light source.

Probably the most annoying issue with the camera is that it can only be used on Windows machines with Internet Explorer. Sorry, no Firefox either. I don't know what Linksys was thinking when they decided to go down this path. If the goal is to make money of this product, why alienate Mac and Linux users? Panasonic's BL-C30A is close in quality and price point but can be viewed on multiple platforms. It does not, however, have the audio capabilities that the Linksys model has.

At the time of this writing, Linksys has only released one firmware update to address an ActiveX warning when downloading the necessary control to Internet Explorer.

I would love to outfit other areas of my house with these units, but I'm holding off until I see what kind of support Linksys provides. Until the platform dependency and audio sync issues are addressed, I'm holding off.

In the meantime, it remains a hit with the family overseas who get to see my son on a daily basis.