Wilife DVS800I LukWerks Indoor Starter Kit

Average customer rating: 3.5

LukWerks works great.
Excellent security system for home use
This thing is going back in the box.
Has its limitations
Easy to Install and Easy to Manage

Similar Items:

Wilife DLC810I LukWerks Indoor Add-on Camera
Wilife DLC810E LukWerks Outdoor Add-on Camera

Wilife DVS800I LukWerks Indoor Starter Kit

Manufacturer: Wilife Inc.
Product Group: CE
Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B000E0I9K4

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Safety & Security

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Product Description

Wilife Inc. DVS-800i Lukwerks Starter Kit Digital Video Surveillance System The LukWerks Starter Kit includes all the components for a complete single-camera system. With LukWerks, you can quickly add a professional-grade digital surveillance system to your home or small business using your Windows PC as the command center. Features: * Live video monitoring of up to six cameras * Motion triggered recordings save disk space * Powerful searchand playback tools * Email and cell phone alerts * Free remote viewing for anywhere anytime access

Customer Reviews:

LukWerks works great........2007-03-21

Have had this installed for a few days and could not be happier. Have not experienced any of the problems that other reviewers have mentioned. I use this to watch the baby's play area which is near the front door so I can also see who is coming and going. I spend most of my time at work in front of a computer and the remote view is great for checking on the baby throughout the day. Will be adding additional cameras in the near future.

Excellent security system for home use.......2007-03-20

After having our home vandalized by local teenagers (but no proof of the culprits' identities), we decided to invest in a home security system. We found ourselves faced with two unattractive options: either a wired system (which would require significant expense to install) or a wireless system, with its inherent intermittent failures. Neither was appealing. While bemoaning our dilemma, a friend of ours (who happens to be a NASA astronaut) recommended this system. We could not be happier! This system uses the existing electrical lines to transmit the data. So just plug the cameras into a wall outlet, and plug a device into your computer (which is also plugged into a wall outlet). Within minutes, we had a fully functioning system. It is awesome!! I love being able to log into the Internet from work, and seeing a live feed from my home. It truly provides peace of mind! I have not experienced any of the technical issues that other reviewers have described. Yes, your computer does need to stay "on" 100% of the time, but that isn't a problem for me. We now have three cameras installed, and I'm about to add a fourth. Truly a versatile and easy-to-use system. And oh - by the way - the local teenagers have figured out that we have this system. We have video of them staring at the cameras one day .... and they have not bothered us since. Priceless.

This thing is going back in the box........2007-01-31

First: You HAVE to have your PC ON 100% of the time or the camera will not work. If you leave town & want streaming video remotely - you HAVE to leave your computer on the whole time or the camera will not work. Hate that.

Second: The program CONTINUALLY taxes my CPU & I constantly get the message that my virtual memory is too low. My 1 Gig RAM, 2.0 Ghz processor & 64 MEG video card are MORE than sufficient for 1 little camera. But - it SLOWS everything down so much that I cannot use anything while this software is running. Tech support walked me through all the diganostics & NOTHING. No help.

Third: Video quality SUCKS. Had to change it to 10 or even 5 frames per second w/ 320X240 resolution (pictures stinks) & still kills my pc w/ an ugly picture. Another review said something about not being able to read license plates down the street - UH - I'm lucky to make out large objects - text would be IMPOSSIBLE.

Fourth: HUGE delay. If I use one for the front door, I better hope someone wants to stand there for 2 minutes while the camera catches up to show me what's going on. I can see what my dogs DID - not what they're DOING. I can also watch myself do things I did 5 minutes ago. POINTLESS. I need LIVE video.

Fifth: NO SOUND - SUCKS.

Sixth: No remote control whatsoever. Cannot pan, tilt - nothing.

Seventh: Camera CONTINUALLY goes black w/out explanation. Have to close out of software and reopen , and then it works again. Kinda hard to do that when you're on the road.

I did a lot of research on these types of cameras and decided on this based on reviews here and in magazines. I have a feeling the positive reviews are a PR spin & not actual customers. This camera is going back in the box & 2 days of my life spent troubleshooting this stupid thing are gone. Maybe the technology just isn't there yet and it's better to wait until it is. Don't buy this product. It's NOT plug & play & it is definitely NOT reliable.

Has its limitations.......2006-11-27

Highlights
---------

Pros:
1. Combines the advantages of wireless cameras (no messy, expensive wires) and hard-wired cameras (dependable picture transmission, free of interference).
2. Price is much lower than traditional surveillance systems. No need to buy a video recorder. Your PC is the recorder.
3. Recording can be either motion-activated or continuous.
4. Retrieval of video is easy if you know exactly what time you want to replay.
5. Camera lens swivels for easily changing the viewing angle, even after mounting the camera.
6. Mounting hardware includes a desktop stand, a wall/ceiling mount, and a window-pane mount.
7. Any video frame, live or playback, can be saved to a JPEG file.
8. Free internet account provides remote access to the cameras (live only, no playback).

Cons:
1. Cameras do not work from some electrical outlets.
2. Retrieval of video is cumbersome and slow if you want to review a long period of time to see if anything of interest happened.
3. In the viewing windows, motion (both live and playback) is jerky.
4. My computer sometimes (about once a week, on average) loses contact with one or all cameras, requiring unplugging and replugging either the camera or the USB connection.

Detailed Review
---------------

Overall, this is a very good product. I love the convenience of looking out windows through my computer monitor. And setting up an internet account to get the same views while traveling was as easy as checking a checkbox and deciding on a password.

My house faces west, which means that a camera looking out back faces the rising sun, and a camera looking out front faces the setting sun. Therefore, my main pre-purchase concern was about the effect of direct sunlight on a LükWerks camera. I e-mailed LükWerks about this and received the following response:

Dear C. Wagner,
Thank you for contacting the LükWerks Technical Support Team.
Direct sunlight should not harm the cameras, and the software has settings for lighting management that may help with the video image you get as a result of the direct sunlight.
Best regards,
Christopher
WiLife Technical Support Team

So I bought the starter kit and one extra camera. I bought the indoor system because my homeowner's association would probably not allow a conspicuous outdoor camera because it would disrupt the neighborhood's uniform appearance. (Eye roll.)

Amazon currently sells LükWerks through Marketplace sellers, including Electronica Direct. Electronica Direct's price was low, and their delivery was amazingly quick.

Software installation was easy. There was a conflict with the Norton firewall, but the installation walked me through the resolution.

Hardware installation was not as easy. The instructions included this early warning of problems to come: "Never point the camera directly toward the sun," which contradicted the above response from WiLife tech support.

I installed one LükWerks camera on my front door. This door is on the northwest corner of my house. (This fact becomes important later.) Every LükWerks camera has a corresponding "power supply" that plugs into an electrical outlet and connects to the camera via a supplied eight-foot ethernet cable. I ran the ethernet cable in a way that left it undisturbed by the opening and closing of the door.

Through the first night and day of use, I was pleased by the great view down my front walk. I was almost ready to write a glowing, five-star product review and buy two more LükWerks cameras. The back-window camera, looking down at a fairly sharp angle from the second floor, was undisturbed by the rising sun. As the sun swung around to the southwest, I guessed that my front-door camera would be OK because the lens aimed not at the sky but at the street. At first, the camera reacted to the sun with a small red halo in the sunward corner of the picture. Then things "hit the fan", so to speak.

The camera simply stopped working. It dropped out of the LükWerks system, which now recognized only the back-window camera. Attempts to reconnect the front camera, using the "Rediscover" and "Find my camera" features, didn't work. The camera itself looked dead; its little lights were no longer flashing.

Finally, using the LükWerks diagnostics, I was able to get the camera working from some power outlets. Eventually it became clear that the camera refused to work from any outlet in the northwest quadrant of the house! So I re-installed the camera in a southwest upstairs window, looking down at a sharper angle than before. This will apparently work because the camera has been through several more sunsets with no problem. (But I miss that front-door view....)

What caused the problem? It was sunlight, heat, a fragile ethernet connection because the outlet is one of the more distant outlets from my PC, or any combination of these factors. The camera was installed between a glass storm door and the main front door. On a sunny afternoon, the space between these doors gets very hot. For whatever reason, the camera now perceives the entire northwest corner of my house as a hostile environment and refuses to work in it. (I know it's not a sentient being, but after all that work on it, I'm kind of attached to it.)

With a now-stable setup, the cameras perform reasonably well. Picture clarity is slightly better than that of my older surveillance cameras, and the field of view is wider. I can watch a car go further down the street, but I still cannot read the license plate. One little complaint: The video, both playback and real-time, is jerky, even though I have set the frame and bit rates to the maximums. My two other surveillance systems, which record onto digital video recorders, record video smoothly.

Regarding the motion detection, I like how WiLife designed the setup. You can draw motion-detection boxes in the viewing area. Outside these boxes, motion will not initiate recording. You can also adjust the sensitivity, i.e., how BIG a moving object will start a recording. You can make it so sensitive that it will record a cat walking through the picture, or so insensitive that it won't even react to a truck. It is true, as one reviewer complained, that there is no middle ground between too sensitive and too insensitive. For example, if you make it sensitive enough to record a walking person, then it will record a tree branch moving in the wind. If you make it only sensitive enough to detect a truck, then if the sun goes behind a cloud and darkens every pixel, that will start a recording, and you will have a nice little video clip of the picture darkening. What to do? Get used to it. It is still better than not having motion detection, which would require constant recording so that you don't miss anything.--Imagine sitting for an hour to see what happened during another hour. (You can play the video back at faster-than-normal speed, but the faster you play it back, the more frames are dropped, and the greater the chance that you'll miss something.) Imagine the storage requirements of 24/7 recording.--Take advantage of LükWerks motion zones to avoid objects that frequently move in the wind.

LükWerks shows a bar graph of when it detected motions and therefore recorded video clips. You can click on a mark to replay the video clip for that time. Or you can step through the clips. I have a complaint about this interface. It is slow. There are no thumbnails. You're just looking at a bunch of marks, and you have to replay each clip to see what happened. To be fair, as you step through the marks, you are shown the first picture of each clip, one at a time, and this could be thought of as a crude thumbnail interface. But these pictures are not very helpful because the recordings start three or four seconds before motion was detected. This has the small advantage that the video clip shows the context of the motion -- nothing happening, then motion, then nothing happening -- and the large disadvantage that the thumbnail is useless because it is a snapshot of the first, nothing-happening part. In another system that I use, an array of thumbnails shows WHAT WAS MOVING. If the thumbnail shows nothing of interest, it's because something innocuous, like a tree branch, was moving. Looking at a screen full of thumbnails, I can immediately spot the clip(s) with interesting objects. I have to scroll through several screens of thumbnails, but each screen takes only a few seconds, and I can review a day in five minutes. I would love to see LükWerks provide this type of interface to the video clips.

11/28/06 update: I just realized that a true thumbnail interface is available by using Windows Explorer to look at the LükWerks video folders. However, as I mention above, most of the thumbnails miss the moving "something" that was the whole point of recording the video clip. LükWerks should provide an option to NOT retrieve the pre-motion video. Even better, LükWerks should provide thumbnails that look forward half a second or a second into the motion, thus allowing the moving object to get all the way into the thumbnail. This would miss the occasional bird flying across a corner of the picture, but that is a small loss compared to capturing the vast majority of moving objects in the thumbnails.

Easy to Install and Easy to Manage.......2006-09-22

I love my wilife cameras. I have tried buying other wireless cameras and after spending countless weeks trying to get it to be accessible through the internet, I gave up. My friend read about Wilife in Fortune magazine and I decided to give it a try. First with one camera then I purchased two more. It was very easy to installed. It records well and I am able to use it to check when our employees show up for work and when they leave. It give me great joy to see our employees are honest with their timecards and I am able to see if the office is being left unattended. The biggest plus is the record feature and have it stored on my computer at work for use at anytime. Lukwerks is very good with updating their software if you give them feed back on features you would like to have. I wanted the cam to automatically start when the computer booted up and in a few weeks, I saw a softare upgrade for it. I was very pleased. I am sure there are tons of stuff they can do to make it even better, but I find Wilife cameras to be easy to use and works very well for me. Remember to get the 120 degrees fisheye lense as extras.. they are great and give a wider view of the room. I wish they have an even wider angle lense for the camera and able to record sounds.. That would be awesome..

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