The Nitty Gritty:
- The claim: Simple setup and installation
The honest truth is yes this product is exceedingly easy to set up and install. The instructions are clear and concise and if nothing else the pieces are pretty self explanatory. You put the camera on the mount, plug the white cable into the white box and into the white camera, then plug black cable to black box then the other end into your router. Both Power line kits light up letting you know they can talk to each other. What is even better is this setup does not require any PC interaction at all it connects directly to the internet and to D-Lifes servers. Here in lies my biggest complaint about this product as well… I wish there was a way for you to direct the feed to your local machine or some other network storage device for times when you have no internet access, atlas this is not possible. The current setup can view the feed through Internet Explorer 6 or 7 (sorry no firefox or IE 8 support) but there is no way to record this feed to a fixed storage drive.
- The claim: Anywhere access to you camera video feed.
This goes back to my previous comment about needing to use Internet explorer 6 or 7 because you get an error message when you try to open it using Firefox or Opera this error also happens with the new IE 8.
Other then not being able to open this in either Firefox or Opera, the service only allows you to save a total of 100 snapshots after the 100 snapshots (each consisting of 5 pictures) you will receive an email warning you that your storage is full. At which time you can log on and either save or delete the snapshots but until you do so you will not capture any further images. These things combined seem to limit this service’s usefulness if you have pets or have guests over and you forget to clear your snapshots afterward.
One of the other major issues I ran into with the limited storage is even with the sensitivity setting set to its lowest the camera was still picking up subtle light changes through out the day. A good example is I set the camera facing the door there is a decent sized window to the left about 20ft away with closed blinds. I was receiving email notices of new movement at least 4 times a day. When I checked into the camera there wasn’t any change from picture to picture.
Quality of service:
Picture quality is okay for this size camera it’s not spectacular but neither is it crappy
As you can see it isn’t too bad. Enough to find out if that pesky roommate or an ex-girlfriend has been in your house, just don’t expect to be doing any high tech analysis with this video feed. When you are viewing the feed locally you can view it forever but if you log into the site via the internet you only can view 120 seconds of live feed per refresh which is a pretty lame restriction. As I said before you can not log this video feed locally, the only recording you will get from this device is from the snapshots. I will add though that while doing the live feed you can also get sound which is an option editable via the control panel (below)
You can set what the schedule you want for turning on the motion detection to help limit the number of snapshot events that happen as well as how sensitive the motion sensor is, although I have found even on its lowest settings it’s still pretty sensitive. The photo sensor on the camera is not smart enough to distinguish between movement and ambient light changes so turning a light on in the room with trigger a snapshot, this is something I have found particularly irritating.
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