D-Link DCS-900 10/100TX Home Security Internet Camera

I bought this camera as a means to check my house while I am gone on vacation. I never heard of internet cameras before until recently while looking at PC catalogs. I ended up buying the DCS-900 because of the price and the good reviews I read here in Amazon.com. Let me tell what my experience has been so far.

Getting the camera setup on your local LAN is fairly straightforward. As long as you know the IP address of your router and how to do simple network configuration for the camera, you should be up and running in 10 minutes.

On the otherhand, configuring the camera for access from the web took me 2 days of searching for info on the Internet, emails to D-Link technical support, firmware upgrade for my router and constant rereading of the manuals and the D-Link Knowledge Base. Listen carefully because here's what they don't tell you about the product beforehand if you want access your camera from the web.

1) Camera's default port is 80. If you have Cable or DSL broadband, most ISPs do not allow access to port 80 to discourage their customers from setting up webservers on their network. You have to set the camera to some other port like 800 or so.

2) You must be comfortable with setting up your router and understand how port forwarding and virtual server table works. If you have a firewall, then you must make more configuration changes. Make sure you access to your broadband router and you feel comfortable making these changes. D-Link documentation only reference their own routers as examples.

3) If your broadband connection has Dynamic IP addressing which most cable and DSL subscribers do, you have to set up a Dynamic DNS account with services like DynDNS.org or TZO.com. There, you create a DNS address (i.e. ) that will map to the dynamic address of your broadband connection. The software on camera will perform updates to the Dynamic DNS for you if your IP address changes.

4) You will also need a static web service account for the ActiveX Xplug Control software to be located when accessing the camera. Essentially this is a place where you can host webpages onto for access from the Internet. My geocities.com account prevents me from uploading the xplug.ocx file onto the server w/o an upgrade to a premium account at this time.

5) Make sure your router has the latest firmware to support virtual servers. This was the last step that prevented me from making the camera visible on the net.

Soooo....after all these steps, I was very successful in getting my camera up and running just the way I want it. I think this is a great product and I highly recommend it. You do have to have a little bit of network experience to comfortably configure everything.

I can not give it the full five stars because I think the documentation was fairly lacking when it comes to describing what you need to do to set the camera up for Internet access. As a matter of fact, even the description for the camera setup itself was somewhat vague and very terse. However, once you get pass all that, I am happy to say that it all works well!!

Pros

Built in webserver

Reliable

Good Value

Good quality in good lighting

Cons

Hard to configure for novice users (was easy for me)

Heavy on system resources when recording video to hard drive

Picture quality is every grainy in low light

Buy D-Link DCS-900 10/100TX Home Security Internet Camera Now

first off, when I received the unit I thought it was rather big compared to the images on the websites. I wanted to share this advice for those people that does not know how to get this thing started. The original ip address of the unit is 192.168.0.20, which means if you have a home network set at 192.168.1.xxx or 192.168.2.xxx, etc. It will not be able to recognize the camera because it is in a different subnet. So you will have to set your laptop/desktop's ip address to that range between 192.168.0.1 through 192.168.0.254 except 192.168.0.20 (since that belongs to the dcs-900). once you launch the crappy wizard software it will recognize the camera's ip address so you can configure it to your home network address.

I hope this helped a lot of you. :) It only took me 2 minutes to configure this thing.

Read Best Reviews of D-Link DCS-900 10/100TX Home Security Internet Camera Here

I wanted to monitor a construction project in my apartment courtyard, but could not take time off from work. I decided to hook up a Internet camera to my cable modem so I could watch the progress from my desk. After some research I wound up buying the D-Link DCS-900. It was by far the least expensive camera, but it suited my purpose.

I set it up in a window overlooking the project and I was able to watch the workers rebuild the flagstone courtyard. On several occasions, I saw mistakes and was able to call the contractor on his cell phone. I know the project would not have turned out as well as it did if I didn't have this camera.

As others have pointed out, the photo quality is grainy and it will only work in well-lit areas, but if you don't want to empty your wallet, this is a great camera for the price.

Want D-Link DCS-900 10/100TX Home Security Internet Camera Discount?

I have three D-Link cameras two DCS-900W and one DCS-950. All three required firmware updates, all three came with obsolete viewing software, two have had to go back for repairs (one 900W and one 950) --and they're giving me problems again. Unfortunately, they're 200 miles from here, and I can't easily get to them, so reliability is an issue with me.

Then there's the documentation issue. There's no hint of the fact that the latest version of their multi-view software (which lets you look at up to four cameras at the same time) doesn't work with anything under Windows XP, or that the only browser that works with the 950 is Internet Explorer. Local setup on a network is fairly easy, but going through a firewall creates problems, the least of which is that it is difficult to test from inside the network. The documentation mentions three ports that need changing, but doesn't explain much about what they do (and the 950 has a fourth port that the documentation doesn't even mention).

The DCS-900 descriptions mention motion sensing, but they don't tell you that this function has to be implemented remotely that is, the camera is set up to stream continuous video to a remote computer, and it is the computer that then monitors for motion and records it when detected.

As to video quality the 950 is fairly decent, but the 900 is much worse. The 950 has a mike for audio, and it works fairly well from inside the firewall, but I still haven't figured out how to access it from outside. And the FAQ on DLink's web site contradicts their manual.

I like the fact that D-Link supplies a program to view multiple cameras at the same time, but not all D-Link cameras work with the same program version, so you can't mix other models or brands. (The D-Link web site has a later version that supports both the 900 and 950 models, but this one has some installation problems and run-time errors.)

My overall impression D-Link rushed this out the door and it shows.