Save your money
Written: Feb 23 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good housing. Good low light.
Cons: Can't use 75% of the advertised features. Unreliable. Poor tech support.
The Bottom Line: Do not buy this camera unless you need low light and you are going to be near by to cycle power.
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| vpatui's Full Review: Toshiba IK-WB11A Webcam |
I bought this for $599 at Frys. I bought it to monitor my vacation house. As the previous poster stated, their web setup is clunky. The night vision is good, but after that....
The camera hangs in low light situations, the only way out is a reboot. If you're not local to the camera, make sure you something like an X10 phone interface and an appliance module to reboot it. Save a plane trip.
The motion sensor just flat does not work correctly.
The e-mail on alarm works a good 25% of the time, although I can never tell what made it alarm. When it fails, it never re-trys.
Viewing alarms is so difficult, it's not even worth it unless you know you've been broken into. Not that it would catch it.
It doesn't really know how to deal with SD cards. It doesn't matter if you format them, or you let it format them, after a short period of time it marks it bad. (At Tech supports request I went out and bought another SD card because they were sure it wasn't their unit that was the problem)
The digital zoom is almost worthless. I don't even know why it lets you go to the higher magnifications.
50% of the time the pan/tilt controls will not load.
You have to download the documentation from their web site.
Tech support is abysmal, although they are nice enough. It seems like their main job is to make sure you keep it long enough so that you can't return it. ("Now, if I could just get you to reboot the camera again...") So now I'm stuck with it.
With respect to the wireless, if you are having any performance difficulties at all, expect Tech support to tell you that you should really not run this wirelessly. Too bad for me that's why I bought it.
Think carefully about what you want to do. There are inexpensive network cameras out there that show you a picture at 1/5 the price. If you need pan/tilt and want zoom spend a little more. (and not much more either). If I had had this camera local to me instead of in another state, I would have returned it without doubt.
I should also admit that after the last patch, the camera has run as long as 7 days without hanging. A big improvement. Who knows, maybe with time they will get all the bugs out.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
vpatui
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 0 members
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